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Comment by zrail | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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