Download a CSV of your Amazon purchases | Hacker News Reader

Download a CSV of your Amazon purchases

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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).

Yeah same, the only "good" way I found was using the amazon synchrony store card, it displays the item name alongside the charges, which makes it doable to find the related orders for purchase categorization

Plus the 5% kickback isn't too shabby.

I think Amazon charges when an item is shipped, so of it requires two shipments you get two charges. I could be wildly off though.

Naw this was _one item_. One shipment. One package. It's the strangest thing.

At least the bank statement for an Amazon purchase contains an ID that can easily be linked to a purchase on the website. I have also seen the behaviour of multiple items in the same purchase being split across different transactions. I think this happens when the items are actually offered by non-Amazon sellers.

I wish PayPal transactions would contain an ID that is somehow useable.

Wait it does? I've never been able to reverse that ID.

The memo starts with something like "123-0000000-1234567 Amazon.de". The corresponding link would be https://www.amazon.de/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=123-0...

Ah. US credit card transactions have an id that looks like a hash, presumably because card charge descriptors have such a short maximum length.

Same in Europe at least for VISA/MC, the parent probably used a non-card payment method.

I do this every few months. I managed to solve this by “constraint satisfaction” searching (do the credit cards charges and shipment combinations add up to the order total?)

Took me a while, but it works well now. I am thinking of switching it to the crawler though.

I use YNAB and this was always so daunting and the worst part of falling behind on reconciling imports. Then someone on r/ynab mentioned the transactions page:

Account -> Your Transactions (used to be Account -> Your Payments -> Transactions)

It was life changing in that I didn't have to waste time going through the purchases page trying to figure out how things were split. Wish target would do the same, it's worse with the they apply discounts.

This is exactly the same process I went through. Life changing, right up until Amazon started taking 5 days to even ship an item to me.

Another lifetime YNABer here. Great tip.

If I see a charge for 14.35, for example, I search my gmail for “14.35” and in the email click “order details.”

https://www.amazon.com/cpe/yourpayments/transactions

Also YNAB user who found reconciling Amazon to be a total bane of my sanity.

That's just straight bookmarked for me now.

Great tip! I'm using Tiller instead of YNAB but this is as useful!

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.

I'm aware of no such law in the US, are you in the EU?

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...

> 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.

This practice stems from the merchant agreement contracts sellers have with credit card networks.

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-merchan...

Purchase every item in a separate order. There's no downside if you have Prime (for free shipping) and it makes reconciliation and customer service easier too.

Unless you mean a single item/order was charged as two separate charges, which I've never heard of happening before. Did you change the order or shipping after placing it?

The downside is an incredible amount of waste as each order could be packed separately. So much extra waste.

They usually still combine it. If I have ordered something and then remember to order something else shortly later they still will often ship together anyway.

That’s funny! I was just talking to my wife about how I was frustrated that they don’t combine shipments here as I stared at 4 stupid Amazon envelopes on my porch! How can Amazon be so different from fulfillment center to fulfillment center!

Hmmm, that is interesting. I wonder if the items were all in different fulfillment centers so when you ordered them separate they opted to send them separate instead of combining. Not sure how Amazon figures out that logic but I have definitely had many orders get combined. It doesn't always happen, but it's pretty frequent.

The orders are not filled based on the order.

You can have a single order in 5 different shippments, or 5 orders in a single shipment.

how many shipments is largely governed by

1. What fulfillment center has the products you orders, not every fulfillment center has ever product all the time .

2. Your shipping preference, often times on a single order it will ask you if you want "fastest" shipping which can be shipping products from multiple fulfillment center, or "less trips" which may take longer so inventory can arrive the fulfillment center with the rest of your order

3. If it fulfilled by Amazon or Not... If you order 3 items only 1 of which is "fulfilled by Amazon" then it will come from 3 different places.

I was frustrated & puzzled hugely as well, until I realized there's multiple fulfillment centres in my metropolis, and not all will have all the items. So while I ordered 5 items that I feel are logically related (e.g. "Guitar Music stuff" or "Computer stuff"), in reality they might come from multiple centres on multiple trucks.

Amazon will usually mention an option "send using smallest number of packages" I think when they are from same centre but with potentially different shipping times.

(and that's for "Sold and Shipped by Amazon" stuff; I haven't a foggiest how things which are Sold by XYZ but Fulfilled by Amazon; vs Sold & Shipped by ABC are done. I noticed in such situations they'll come with wildly different couriers as well; there's one minor company that absolutely positively does not actually deliver or accurately deliver packages to my house, but I haven't figured out the pattern/trigger and my complaints have gone to deaf ears)

> that's for "Sold and Shipped by Amazon" stuff; I haven't a foggiest how things which are Sold by XYZ but Fulfilled by Amazon; vs Sold & Shipped by ABC are done

Fulfilled by Amazon is the same as Sold and Shipped by Amazon in this regard. They may combine these in one shipment; it's not separated by vendor.

Sold and Shipped from $VENDOR is a separate system. Amazon notifies the vendor, who ships the merchandise using whatever delivery service they want to use. These orders will never be combined with a Sold and Shipped by Amazon or Fulfilled by Amazon order.

Use the Amazon Prime day to delay your shipments by 2 days or so (if you don't need them urgently), and they'll often combine the shipments.

I do this since items are left at my door and want fewer days I may have to stay home but it is never delivered that way. I can still get three different last mile delivery services for things I'd prefer in one late shipment and bought in same cart. I'm sure it's in the algorithm but it's not top priority.

Part of Prime day benefits touted discounts or money back or something (at one point) and I have yet to see anything come from that. I’m curious if anyone has or what the deal is.

Generally they combine them the same as if you'd ordered together.

Conversely a single order can be split into separate shipments.

Amazon already figures out how to get orders to you most efficiently. If it can pack items together because they're in the same warehouse, it will. If items are necessarily coming from different locations it won't.

(And if you opt for slower shipping it will sometimes be able to combine items it wouldn't otherwise.)

Items are already shipped independent of what order they belong to. You can receive half an order or 2 orders together at the same time.

It's all based on location, warehouse inventory, and logistics capacity. This is why you can set individual shipping preferences for each item in your order in the first place.

Not it isn't, they'll combine anyway, and also sometimes not if it's in the same order. (Sometimes it seems to make sense, e.g. fitting two smaller boxes better, other times not.)

There's just no correlation between #orders and #packages (or even #deliveries) so that's not a reason to behave one way or the other.

This drove me crazy for the longest time, but I discovered there's a payments page[1] that lists each individual charge with a link to the order it's associated with. This has made reconciliation in YNAB much faster and reliable.

1. https://www.amazon.com/cpe/yourpayments/transactions

Just choked because I worked at a (now defunct) startup that was solving this exact problem (though targeted at b2b with thousands/millions of transactions and many/unknown number of columns). There are a couple of products in this space but nothing consumer facing (read: cheap) afaik

Just out of interest, why are you doing this instead of e.g. just checking that the totals match up? Or is that also difficult?

My overriding goal with my personal finance system is to have penny-accurate categorization so that I can make accurate predictions about future spending. Right now a significant portion of my family's spending runs through two Amazon accounts charging to the same credit card, which is problematic because I have to check both accounts transactions.

I gave up awhile back and just dump everything into an Amazon category, which that leads to misleading projections.

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.

I would think Germany would have a standardized digital receipt of transaction in xml that retailers would be required to provide.

Germany is a bit backwards in all sorts of digital areas when you compare it to other european countries.

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.

UK has a list of my orders dating back to 2002, not as easy data though, just different pages I'd have to scrape

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) 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

their GDPR dump utility contains all of the information here , admittedly in annoying format... seems to be the database table directly as json)

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.

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.

Please check article 20 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

It only concerns file format right? I interpreted the preceding conversation as talking about format in the sense of data having the same schema and maybe being interoperable, and not just file format. Nothing I read seems to indicate that seamless interoperability is a requirement [0] [1].

Interoperability seems a little difficult to enforce, like brokers that don't support fractional shares might need to start supporting them to import data from other brokers. Edit: I guess this example is poor but I just wanted to point out that schema/interop also involves data domain, validation, etc.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

[1] https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/risk/articles/gdpr-dat...

> GDPR is about privacy and security, not interoperability.

    Article 20 [RIGHT TO DATA PORTABILITY]

    1.   The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided, where: ...

Right, and Amazon is providing the data in a commonly used format.

yes, I'm sure the dump of Amazon's 120 column table (with no details on what those columns are) can be easily imported into other firms software

There is no requirement in that law for a specific format, it just has to be something common like csv and not a random EDI file or binary blob with no schema.

It's about data protection, and giving users some means of control over how their data is used online. Privacy and security just happen to be the two very salient dimensions of that. If you read the GDPR wording, you'll see the phrase "data subject empowerment" pop up in various places, which is exactly what I'm after: more empowerment over what we can do with our data.

GDPR has its warts, absolutely. But I don't think that's a reason not to strive for even greater data protection measures for citizens going forward, especially if we amend the existing regulations to fix some of its unintended consequences.

[edit: typo]

Reading the first paragraph I was wondering if the data portability right (part of GDPR) might be helpful, and then you went on to say "Bonus points if companies are also required to allow users to import data in those formats". Dude, that is exactly what GDPR requires! You are describing article 20 literally :). I'm not sure about ecommerce, no idea why I'd want to import invoices into another web shop, but

> Article 20 \n Right to data portability \n 1. The data subject [you] shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to [the company], in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Right, but for the average user, it's not really feasible for them to receive a megabytes-large CSV of data in whatever format Amazon decides to provide, and then transform that into the necessary format for import into <Etsy/Ebay/Shopify>. We could make tools to do so, but then Amazon could just change what format they use for export, so we'd need to update the tools...

Regarding importing: you as a user have the right to provide your downloaded data to a different party, but there's nothing in GDPR that says that party must offer the necessary import capability.

> it's not really feasible for them to receive a megabytes-large CSV of data in whatever format Amazon decides to provide, and then transform that into the necessary format

okay yeah you're still describing Article 20:

> the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible

> their GDPR dump utility

link?

Wow, IIRC that link used to be much easier to find but it seems like they don't want it to be found... :o

"Request Your Personal Information" help article: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

amazon.com link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html

amazon.de link: https://www.amazon.de/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html

(They don't even mention "GDPR" on that page but that should be GDPR compliant.)

I also couldn't get this for the German site.

See comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28024890

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?

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-remove...

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.

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.

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.

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

I started work on using this CSV to analyze my purchases (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

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

Not really an issue: they’ll just ask you find a comparable item on sale for valuation.

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.

"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.

I'm legitimately frightened of tallying purchases.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

PGP signed CSV would work :)

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.

Makes no sense. The company could just fake the "signed document". Having it encrypted makes no difference if the source can't be trusted.

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

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

Says report failed when I try.

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

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