8 ms·

Download a CSV of your Amazon purchases

238 points by daenz 5y ago

throwslackforce 5y ago
What I want is a set of receipts for all of my iTunes Stores purchases, so I have proof that I purchased them if iTunes Store is discontinued and I have to rely on my local backups. I've actually stopped buying from them based on this.
- danuker 5y ago
  A CSV is not proof, it can be easily modified or forged. What you are looking for is a signed document (like a PDF). In my experience, banks and the government offer those. Other companies not so much.
  - bloopernova 5y ago
    PGP signed CSV would work :)
    - kenniskrag 5y ago
      signed by whom? The company which sells the product would have to sign them. Otherwise they can be faked by everyone. Even PDF should be signed IMHO.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Makes no sense. The company could just fake the "signed document". Having it encrypted makes no difference if the source can't be trusted.
zrail 5y ago
This is helpful but if you're trying to reconcile credit card charges to purchase it's _maddening_. See, sometimes Amazon will take an order for a single item and split it across two separate credit card charges. The only way that I've figured out how to accurately reconcile orders to charges is to crawl the invoice pages for every order and extract the charge information (this is not something I do often).
- sk55 5y ago
  There is regulation where e-commerce companies can only charge you after they have shipped the item. That may be why it’s appearing as separate charges.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    I'm aware of no such law in the US, are you in the EU?
    - AnssiH 5y ago
      I'm not the parent, but there is no such EU-wide regulation either, or if there is it is being commonly violated. Charging at order time is common at least in Finland. Many common payment methods do not support "delayed" charges so all methods are often handled the same way, instantly. I just saw this in SwedBank docs, though: https://developer.swedbankpay.com/payment-instruments/mobile-pay/capture https://developer.swedbankpay.com/payment-instruments/mobile... > When dealing in physical goods using two-phase payment instruments, all goods must be shipped before you capture the authorized amount. This is regulated in part by the Swedish Distance and Doorstep Sales Act, required in our terms and (for card payments) required by Visa and Mastercard. It says "in part", though, I didn't check what the Swedish law actually mandates.
    - jonahbenton 5y ago
      This practice stems from the merchant agreement contracts sellers have with credit card networks.
    - sk55 5y ago
      Looks like it's not a law, but a common policy from credit card companies. > However, many credit card issuers have policies against sellers charging a credit card account before shipment. Src: https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2016-08-31/can-merchant-charge-my-credit-card-item-back-order https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2016-08-31/can-merchan...
- Chico75 5y ago
progval 5y ago
It seems to only work on Amazon.com (ie. US). That's a shame, as the alternative (finance-dl + beancount-import) is also restricted to Amazon.com (and possibly other English-speaking countries) and not easy to adapt.
- blibble 5y ago
  their GDPR dump utility contains all of the information here , admittedly in annoying format... seems to be the database table directly as json)
  - notpachet 5y ago
    I really wish that GDPR had gone a step further and imposed some requirements over the shape of the data that companies are required to expose. For domains like ecommerce, or banking, or social media, companies should be required to export their GDPR data in the same format as each other. Bonus points if companies are also required to allow users to import data in those formats. That would make it easier to avoid being locked into a specific platform: export your data from the old one, import it into the new one. Before you say that this is impractical -- Google requires that other companies submit data to it in very specific formats (eg, product listings), so I don't see why governments can't impose similar requirements on companies, too. It probably wouldn't be applicable for companies with highly-specific data models, though.
    - pranavjoneja 5y ago
      GDPR is about privacy and security, not interoperability. It was (and still is) a very controversial set of regulations, so shoehorning in more requirements would have made it even more unpopular.
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        Please check article 20 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679#d1e2753-1-1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
post_break 5y ago
Last time I did this and calculated how much I've spent it hurt.
mavsman 5y ago
I started work on using this CSV to analyze my purchases (https://observablehq.com/@bradydowling/amazon-purchase-analysis https://observablehq.com/@bradydowling/amazon-purchase-analy...) and found out how much better this data could be if Amazon was even slightly custom centric. For example, why don’t I see MY product ratings? Analyzing which of my purchases were “good” purchases would help me spend properly in the future. Plenty of other data that Amazon has that they won’t give me in this report. PS reach out if you’re interested in helping my take this to completion. I was going to make a YouTube video about it as well so I’d love any collaboration
- patja 5y ago
  Why does Amazon serve me ads on the Kindle for books I already bought from Amazon that are currently loaded on that Kindle? Sometimes it is mystifying how many opportunities to better serve their customers and shareholders they leave on the table. I guess it comes down to priorities.
jasode 5y ago
I see the dropdown for selecting the year only goes back to 2006 but my first orders were in 1995. I guess there are some system limits.
- cyberge99 5y ago
  Maybe the older data is stored in Glacier. Give it a few days to run the report.
submeta 5y ago
Not possible in Germany. That’s a shame. I buy tons of things from Amazon and have no overview of my purchases. Have to use a Firefox plugin to get the data. This should be possible on Amazon.de, directly.
- sitkack 5y ago
  I would think Germany would have a standardized digital receipt of transaction in xml that retailers would be required to provide.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
    Germany is a bit backwards in all sorts of digital areas when you compare it to other european countries.
    - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
      Except France where it is worse. I cannot phantom our love for PDFs and physical letters (and cheques). This is maddening when you look at countries such as Estonia or Poland.
- iso1210 5y ago
  UK has a list of my orders dating back to 2002, not as easy data though, just different pages I'd have to scrape
- primeos 5y ago
  No sure if this is an acceptable workaround/alternative [0] for Germany but on the "Request My Data" page (https://www.amazon.de/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html https://www.amazon.de/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html) you can request all of your account data and this should include the following file with all of your orders: Retail.OrderHistory.2/Retail.OrderHistory.2.csv It has the following format: "Marketplace","Order ID","Order Date","Purchase Order Number","Currency","Price","Price Tax","Shipping Charge","Total Discounts","Total Owed","Item Subtotal","Item Subtotal Tax","ASIN","Product Condition","Quantity","Payment Instrument Type","Order Status","Shipment Status","Ship Date","Shipping Option","Shipping Address","Billing Address","Carrier Name & Tracking Number","Product Name","Gift Message","Gift Sender Name","Gift Recipient Contact Details" (Note: My last export is from January so the filename or format might have changed in the meantime.) [0]: It provides more data but is annoying / time consuming to use.
marcinzm 5y ago
It works again? Amazon disabled this for a while, no longer linked from the UI and reports always generated empty. Likely in a move to push people to their business offering since businesses are the most likely to use this feature.
- axiak 5y ago
  Yeah I remember having a long conversation with their support for the alternative solution to this report and they just told me to pound sand. It's crazy to me that it returned without any fanfare.
LanternLight83 5y ago
I've just recently exported all my available Amazon purchase history (Items, Shipments, and Store Card Transactions) alongside the rest of my financial data as I automate as much of my plain text account as I can, and have found it tricky even without encounting the transaction splitting issues noted by commentors below (though I don't care as long as the sum total balence with the sum charges). Trying to figure out how to handle tax, shipping, multiple paymrnt methods used, etc. I'll get there eventually, and likely year the system down to try an alternative import system, but the knowlage will be cumulative (ie. easier the second time around).
fallingknife 5y ago
Says report failed when I try.
- naga_n 5y ago
  fails for me every time for lobger reports, i can get 1 year report when i try for past 15 years it's a fail always
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dmd 5y ago
I wish it went back further. I have amazon purchase history back to the first few months of its existence, but it won't let you go back beyond 2006.
andrew_ 5y ago
I'm legitimately frightened of tallying purchases.
justinsaccount 5y ago
Project idea: Correlate this data with AMZN stock price and determine how much money you would have if you had bought the stock instead of the item.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  You’d have to adjust for the reduced valuation had you not made those purchases
boastful_inaba 5y ago
This doesn't exist on Amazon Japan, which is annoying. It does make me wonder though - how much code is actually in common between the various country-specific Amazons?
city41 5y ago
This is good news. This report used to take several days to receive as I assume it had human steps involved. I'm guessing they fully automated it now. Since the report used to take so long, I created a chrome extension to scrape my orders page and send it to my budgeting app. But then they took the total price away from the page which was so frustrating![1]. But I just looked and they put the total back. Yay! So now either my extension or this csv can get me the data I need. Thanks Amazon, I honestly thought you were making this hard on purpose. Glad to see I was just being pessimistic. [1]https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/total-price-removed-from-customer-order-history-page/800905 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/total-price-remove...
- wdr1 5y ago
  FWIW, this has existed for a while now. My brother tipped me off to it & I used in 2013 to create a chart of my annual Amazon spend. It's pretty obvious when I joined Amazon Prime.
rendaw 5y ago
Do they allow you to get it programmatically, or do you have to log in and press buttons by hand?
stevenicr 5y ago
I'll like to download a csv with product pics zipped.. of my wishlists. I've found that items often disappear from the wishlists - sometimes there is a placeholder with 'no idea if ever back instock' - but many times there is just a blank slot. I have many things in various wishlists I'd like to hunt down around the globe when the time is right if I can't find them via amazon in the future. This makes the wishlist less useful for me, and I've resorted to trying to infinite scroll down many pages and doing a ffx screen shot and 'save page as' to try to get some backups before items vanish from the list. then I realized after many minutes to accomplish this, I have a half dozen or more wishlists that will require the same - meh!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andrewmg 5y ago
This was incredibly useful after we lost most of our belongings in a house fire and then had to produce an inventory list for the insurer. It was an unexpected benefit of using Amazon for so many purchases.
- daenz 5y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that happened. I am preparing for that exact scenario (we live in an area with wildfires), which is what brought me to that link. Did you have any trouble being reimbursed? Did they cover everything? How long did it take?
  - andrewmg 5y ago
    Our insurer was State Farm. Much to my surprise--we've all heard horror stories--they were great from beginning to end. For small items under some threshold, we just had to identify them for reimbursement and provide a recent or current price; for more expensive items, they wanted a receipt, photo, or some kind of proof. Since we buy so many things from Amazon, its CSV allowed us to handle, say, 80 percent of our recent miscellaneous purchases in one fell swoop. For the other stuff, providing documentation took all of a few hours. And the insurer covered everything, without any hassle or dispute. When we got around to submitting claims--which took a few months, due to the press of work--reimbursement followed in a couple weeks. We had some very unusual and expensive things--high-end audio equipment, artwork, and custom-made suiting--that were either damaged or destroyed, and the insurer never blinked an eye. If you're preparing for this kind of thing, probably the easiest and most useful thing to do is to walk around your home and just photograph things. It was surprising (to me) how many possessions I simply forgot about in the aftermath until some event or need triggered a recollection.
    - daenz 5y ago
      Thanks, that's extremely helpful. Did you have any issues with things that you couldn't find a receipt/invoice for? I have some items that I can take a picture of now to prove that I own, but I bought them in person years ago, and can't find a receipt for them.
DaveExeter 5y ago
"Your report has failed. The issue may be temporary so try again in a few hours." Okay people. We cannot all try to generate reports at the same time.
jbotz 5y ago
This doesn't include digital purchases, only physical items that are shipped. Is there an equivalent report for digital purchases?
jsjohnst 5y ago
What’s frustrating with this is that it fails a lot with no obvious recourse. I had to submit the same request multiple times to be successful, often cutting down the duration to just a month at a time or less, to get most of my history. There’s a few time ranges it just perpetually fails no matter how small I make the time window.

238 points by daenz 5y ago

What I want is a set of receipts for all of my iTunes Stores purchases, so I have proof that I purchased them if iTunes Store is discontinued and I have to rely on my local backups. I've actually stopped buying from them based on this.

danuker 5y ago
A CSV is not proof, it can be easily modified or forged. What you are looking for is a signed document (like a PDF). In my experience, banks and the government offer those. Other companies not so much.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  PGP signed CSV would work :)
  - kenniskrag 5y ago
    signed by whom? The company which sells the product would have to sign them. Otherwise they can be faked by everyone. Even PDF should be signed IMHO.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Makes no sense. The company could just fake the "signed document". Having it encrypted makes no difference if the source can't be trusted.

zrail 5y ago

This is helpful but if you're trying to reconcile credit card charges to purchase it's _maddening_. See, sometimes Amazon will take an order for a single item and split it across two separate credit card charges. The only way that I've figured out how to accurately reconcile orders to charges is to crawl the invoice pages for every order and extract the charge information (this is not something I do often).

sk55 5y ago
There is regulation where e-commerce companies can only charge you after they have shipped the item. That may be why it’s appearing as separate charges.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  I'm aware of no such law in the US, are you in the EU?
  - AnssiH 5y ago
    I'm not the parent, but there is no such EU-wide regulation either, or if there is it is being commonly violated. Charging at order time is common at least in Finland. Many common payment methods do not support "delayed" charges so all methods are often handled the same way, instantly. I just saw this in SwedBank docs, though: https://developer.swedbankpay.com/payment-instruments/mobile-pay/capture https://developer.swedbankpay.com/payment-instruments/mobile... > When dealing in physical goods using two-phase payment instruments, all goods must be shipped before you capture the authorized amount. This is regulated in part by the Swedish Distance and Doorstep Sales Act, required in our terms and (for card payments) required by Visa and Mastercard. It says "in part", though, I didn't check what the Swedish law actually mandates.
  - jonahbenton 5y ago
    This practice stems from the merchant agreement contracts sellers have with credit card networks.
  - sk55 5y ago
    Looks like it's not a law, but a common policy from credit card companies. > However, many credit card issuers have policies against sellers charging a credit card account before shipment. Src: https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2016-08-31/can-merchant-charge-my-credit-card-item-back-order https://consumered.georgia.gov/ask-ed/2016-08-31/can-merchan...
Chico75 5y ago

progval 5y ago

It seems to only work on Amazon.com (ie. US). That's a shame, as the alternative (finance-dl + beancount-import) is also restricted to Amazon.com (and possibly other English-speaking countries) and not easy to adapt.

blibble 5y ago
their GDPR dump utility contains all of the information here , admittedly in annoying format... seems to be the database table directly as json)
- notpachet 5y ago
  I really wish that GDPR had gone a step further and imposed some requirements over the shape of the data that companies are required to expose. For domains like ecommerce, or banking, or social media, companies should be required to export their GDPR data in the same format as each other. Bonus points if companies are also required to allow users to import data in those formats. That would make it easier to avoid being locked into a specific platform: export your data from the old one, import it into the new one. Before you say that this is impractical -- Google requires that other companies submit data to it in very specific formats (eg, product listings), so I don't see why governments can't impose similar requirements on companies, too. It probably wouldn't be applicable for companies with highly-specific data models, though.
  - pranavjoneja 5y ago
    GDPR is about privacy and security, not interoperability. It was (and still is) a very controversial set of regulations, so shoehorning in more requirements would have made it even more unpopular.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      Please check article 20 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679#d1e2753-1-1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

post_break 5y ago

Last time I did this and calculated how much I've spent it hurt.

mavsman 5y ago

I started work on using this CSV to analyze my purchases (https://observablehq.com/@bradydowling/amazon-purchase-analysis https://observablehq.com/@bradydowling/amazon-purchase-analy...) and found out how much better this data could be if Amazon was even slightly custom centric. For example, why don’t I see MY product ratings? Analyzing which of my purchases were “good” purchases would help me spend properly in the future. Plenty of other data that Amazon has that they won’t give me in this report. PS reach out if you’re interested in helping my take this to completion. I was going to make a YouTube video about it as well so I’d love any collaboration

patja 5y ago
Why does Amazon serve me ads on the Kindle for books I already bought from Amazon that are currently loaded on that Kindle? Sometimes it is mystifying how many opportunities to better serve their customers and shareholders they leave on the table. I guess it comes down to priorities.

jasode 5y ago

I see the dropdown for selecting the year only goes back to 2006 but my first orders were in 1995. I guess there are some system limits.

cyberge99 5y ago
Maybe the older data is stored in Glacier. Give it a few days to run the report.

submeta 5y ago

Not possible in Germany. That’s a shame. I buy tons of things from Amazon and have no overview of my purchases. Have to use a Firefox plugin to get the data. This should be possible on Amazon.de, directly.

sitkack 5y ago
I would think Germany would have a standardized digital receipt of transaction in xml that retailers would be required to provide.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  Germany is a bit backwards in all sorts of digital areas when you compare it to other european countries.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    Except France where it is worse. I cannot phantom our love for PDFs and physical letters (and cheques). This is maddening when you look at countries such as Estonia or Poland.
iso1210 5y ago
UK has a list of my orders dating back to 2002, not as easy data though, just different pages I'd have to scrape
primeos 5y ago
No sure if this is an acceptable workaround/alternative [0] for Germany but on the "Request My Data" page (https://www.amazon.de/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html https://www.amazon.de/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html) you can request all of your account data and this should include the following file with all of your orders: Retail.OrderHistory.2/Retail.OrderHistory.2.csv It has the following format: "Marketplace","Order ID","Order Date","Purchase Order Number","Currency","Price","Price Tax","Shipping Charge","Total Discounts","Total Owed","Item Subtotal","Item Subtotal Tax","ASIN","Product Condition","Quantity","Payment Instrument Type","Order Status","Shipment Status","Ship Date","Shipping Option","Shipping Address","Billing Address","Carrier Name & Tracking Number","Product Name","Gift Message","Gift Sender Name","Gift Recipient Contact Details" (Note: My last export is from January so the filename or format might have changed in the meantime.) [0]: It provides more data but is annoying / time consuming to use.

marcinzm 5y ago

It works again? Amazon disabled this for a while, no longer linked from the UI and reports always generated empty. Likely in a move to push people to their business offering since businesses are the most likely to use this feature.

axiak 5y ago
Yeah I remember having a long conversation with their support for the alternative solution to this report and they just told me to pound sand. It's crazy to me that it returned without any fanfare.

LanternLight83 5y ago

I've just recently exported all my available Amazon purchase history (Items, Shipments, and Store Card Transactions) alongside the rest of my financial data as I automate as much of my plain text account as I can, and have found it tricky even without encounting the transaction splitting issues noted by commentors below (though I don't care as long as the sum total balence with the sum charges). Trying to figure out how to handle tax, shipping, multiple paymrnt methods used, etc. I'll get there eventually, and likely year the system down to try an alternative import system, but the knowlage will be cumulative (ie. easier the second time around).

fallingknife 5y ago

Says report failed when I try.

naga_n 5y ago
fails for me every time for lobger reports, i can get 1 year report when i try for past 15 years it's a fail always
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

dmd 5y ago

I wish it went back further. I have amazon purchase history back to the first few months of its existence, but it won't let you go back beyond 2006.

andrew_ 5y ago

I'm legitimately frightened of tallying purchases.

justinsaccount 5y ago

Project idea: Correlate this data with AMZN stock price and determine how much money you would have if you had bought the stock instead of the item.

quickthrower2 5y ago
You’d have to adjust for the reduced valuation had you not made those purchases

boastful_inaba 5y ago

This doesn't exist on Amazon Japan, which is annoying. It does make me wonder though - how much code is actually in common between the various country-specific Amazons?

city41 5y ago

This is good news. This report used to take several days to receive as I assume it had human steps involved. I'm guessing they fully automated it now. Since the report used to take so long, I created a chrome extension to scrape my orders page and send it to my budgeting app. But then they took the total price away from the page which was so frustrating![1]. But I just looked and they put the total back. Yay! So now either my extension or this csv can get me the data I need. Thanks Amazon, I honestly thought you were making this hard on purpose. Glad to see I was just being pessimistic. [1]https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/total-price-removed-from-customer-order-history-page/800905 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/total-price-remove...

wdr1 5y ago
FWIW, this has existed for a while now. My brother tipped me off to it & I used in 2013 to create a chart of my annual Amazon spend. It's pretty obvious when I joined Amazon Prime.

rendaw 5y ago

Do they allow you to get it programmatically, or do you have to log in and press buttons by hand?

stevenicr 5y ago

I'll like to download a csv with product pics zipped.. of my wishlists. I've found that items often disappear from the wishlists - sometimes there is a placeholder with 'no idea if ever back instock' - but many times there is just a blank slot. I have many things in various wishlists I'd like to hunt down around the globe when the time is right if I can't find them via amazon in the future. This makes the wishlist less useful for me, and I've resorted to trying to infinite scroll down many pages and doing a ffx screen shot and 'save page as' to try to get some backups before items vanish from the list. then I realized after many minutes to accomplish this, I have a half dozen or more wishlists that will require the same - meh!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andrewmg 5y ago

This was incredibly useful after we lost most of our belongings in a house fire and then had to produce an inventory list for the insurer. It was an unexpected benefit of using Amazon for so many purchases.

daenz 5y ago
I'm sorry to hear that happened. I am preparing for that exact scenario (we live in an area with wildfires), which is what brought me to that link. Did you have any trouble being reimbursed? Did they cover everything? How long did it take?
- andrewmg 5y ago
  Our insurer was State Farm. Much to my surprise--we've all heard horror stories--they were great from beginning to end. For small items under some threshold, we just had to identify them for reimbursement and provide a recent or current price; for more expensive items, they wanted a receipt, photo, or some kind of proof. Since we buy so many things from Amazon, its CSV allowed us to handle, say, 80 percent of our recent miscellaneous purchases in one fell swoop. For the other stuff, providing documentation took all of a few hours. And the insurer covered everything, without any hassle or dispute. When we got around to submitting claims--which took a few months, due to the press of work--reimbursement followed in a couple weeks. We had some very unusual and expensive things--high-end audio equipment, artwork, and custom-made suiting--that were either damaged or destroyed, and the insurer never blinked an eye. If you're preparing for this kind of thing, probably the easiest and most useful thing to do is to walk around your home and just photograph things. It was surprising (to me) how many possessions I simply forgot about in the aftermath until some event or need triggered a recollection.
  - daenz 5y ago
    Thanks, that's extremely helpful. Did you have any issues with things that you couldn't find a receipt/invoice for? I have some items that I can take a picture of now to prove that I own, but I bought them in person years ago, and can't find a receipt for them.

DaveExeter 5y ago

"Your report has failed. The issue may be temporary so try again in a few hours." Okay people. We cannot all try to generate reports at the same time.

jbotz 5y ago

This doesn't include digital purchases, only physical items that are shipped. Is there an equivalent report for digital purchases?

jsjohnst 5y ago

What’s frustrating with this is that it fails a lot with no obvious recourse. I had to submit the same request multiple times to be successful, often cutting down the duration to just a month at a time or less, to get most of my history. There’s a few time ranges it just perpetually fails no matter how small I make the time window.