How to See How Much Money You’ve Spent on Amazon

Most of us have spent quite a bit of money on Amazon over the years, especially during the pandemic. If you want to know exactly how much money you’ve ever spent on your Amazon account, there’s a way to check the total.

Why should you check your Amazon purchase history?

For some people, carefully tracking purchases is part of their business operations. In fact, the tools we use in the how-to portion of the article are meant for business use, but we’re borrowing them for digging through our purchase histories.

For the rest of us, however, it’s largely a matter of curiosity. We’ve looked at how to verify your first Amazon purchase – my first Amazon purchase, a textbook, was pretty boring – and today we’re going to delve even deeper into your Amazon purchase history to solve all sorts of oddities.

If you’ve ever wondered how much you’ve spent on Amazon in total, what your most expensive purchase was, how much you spend each year on your last-minute Christmas shopping on Amazon, or anything else that can be quantified and based on your Amazon Spending habits sorted, you can delve in and find out.

How to see your Amazon purchase totals and more

We can’t analyze data we don’t have, so the first step is to get your hands on your Amazon purchase data in a way that’s easy to sort through and analyze. Scrolling through years of purchases in the standard Amazon order history interface and manually totaling things up isn’t going to do it.

Request your purchase history of your Amazon orders

While logged into your Amazon account on a computer (not in the app on your phone or tablet), navigate to the Order History Reports menu.

You can use this URL to jump directly to the menu. You can do this by clicking on “Accounts & Lists” and then selecting “Accounts” from the drop-down menu.

On the main account page, scroll down to the Order and Purchase Settings section and click Download Order Reports.

Once you are on the resulting “Order History Reports” sub-page, you can use the “Request Order History Report” box at the top of the page to request the reports we need.

To get an accurate insight into your Amazon history and to allow us to answer questions, e.g. B. how much you’ve spent over the years, we actually need to request multiple reports.

First, you must request an “Item” report with a start date equal to your first Amazon purchase and ending with the current date. This will generate a report in Comma Separated Value spreadsheet format (.CSV file) showing each individual purchase and its associated dates.

Second, you need to request additional reports for the Refunds report type – you can skip requesting the Returns report type because returns data only shows items that are physically returned to Amazon, does not include the monetary amount, and does not include data for items for which You received a refund but did not return an item (e.g. a refund for a damaged or lost shipment).

If you have an Amazon account with a long purchase history, be warned that you may have to wait minutes to hours for the request to complete.

In some cases, you can even end up with a failed report request. In this case, we recommend splitting your purchase history data. So instead of requesting an article report covering the period 01/01/1999 to present, pick a dot in the middle and subdivide it like 01/01/1999 to 12/31/2011 and then 01/01/2012 to present. You get two reports, but it’s just plain tabular data that you can merge.

How to analyze your Amazon purchase history

Once you have the CSV files, all you have to do is open them in your favorite spreadsheet application and use some basic spreadsheet functions like summing and sorting to pull out the data you want. You can use Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, OpenOffice Calc or Apple Numbers or any other spreadsheet application that supports CSV

With the Items table and Refunds table loaded, here are some interesting questions to answer about your Amazon purchase history and how to answer them.

The formatting of these Amazon purchase history tables has remained very consistent over time, with reports we’ve accessed in specific locations over the years using the same formatting conventions. In the following instructions, we refer to the letter and column title with the knowledge that they will look the same to you, but please adjust the instructions to reflect changes to the column order.

What was the first thing I bought on Amazon?

You can check your Amazon account’s regular checkout page to see what you bought first from Amazon. Or you can sort column A, “Order Date” in the Items table using the A-Z sort function. The top entry should be the earliest purchase. In my case, it’s the textbook I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

TIED TOGETHER: Here’s how to see the first Amazon purchase you’ve ever made

How many Amazon orders have I placed?

The number of Amazon orders you have placed on Amazon is the total number of rows in the Items table minus one (since one row of the table is the header rows at the top). For example, if your table has 1,295 rows, you have played 1,294 orders on Amazon.

If you want to know how many orders you have placed, excluding returns and refunds for damaged shipments and the like, you can also subtract the same value (number of rows minus one) from the Refunds table from your total orders.

How Much Did I Spend on Amazon?

To get an accurate view of how much you’ve spent at Amazon over the years, we need to use the SUM function to add up two values: how much you’ve paid Amazon and how much they’ve refunded you.

First, in the Items table, you need to locate the AD column, Item Total. This column shows what you actually paid including tax. Other columns in the table, such as B. Column M, “Purchase Price Per Unit,” shows the pre-tax price and Column L, “List Price per Unit,” shows the list price, not the actual price.

Scroll to the bottom of the column and create a simple sum function in your spreadsheet application like =SUM(AD2:ADX) where the final value X is the value of the last row of data, e.g AD1209 . The resulting value is the sum of the column and represents the total amount you paid Amazon.

Now repeat the process by creating a SUM function in the Refunds report. Because the refund report provides the purchase price refund and the tax refund in separate columns, we need to combine them. Scroll all the way down and combine column J “Refund Amount” with column K “Refund Tax Amount” via the function =SUM(J2:JX, K2:KX) where you replaced it X with the number of the last line, such as J40 and K40 .

Now simply subtract the value of the purchase and the tax refund from the total value we just created in the Items table. If your total purchase history is $20,000 and total refund history is $1,600, then the total amount you actually spent on Amazon is $18,400.

What items were gifts?

This particular question is a bit tricky to answer as not every gift you buy from Amazon has necessarily been shipped to the recipient from Amazon.

You may need to sift through the data, looking for purchases made around holidays you celebrate, like family members’ birthdays, Christmas, or other holidays where you give gifts, to really dial in.

But if you use Amazon frequently to ship gifts to friends and family across the country, you’re in luck. You can sort column T, “Shipping Address Name,” to sort all your Amazon shipments by recipient name. Then just skip your own name and look at everything you’ve sent out to everyone else.

What is the most expensive thing I bought on Amazon?

To find the most expensive product you bought on Amazon, you can sort by price before or after tax. Before you do this, though, it’s a fun game to try and guess what you think the item is. For example, I’ve surmised that the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought on Amazon was a GPU, a high-end monitor, or some other equally expensive tech kit.

If you guessed, simply sort the AD “Total Amount” column (for price after tax) or the M “Unit Purchase Price” column (for price before tax) using the ZA sort function to show the highest value on top the side.

A GPU and a high-end monitor were actually in my top 10 most expensive purchases, but it turns out the top two things were an ultra-lightweight wheelchair for my father-in-law and a premium saddle-style window air conditioner.

For all the sorting I did, I have to say that sorting by most expensive purchases ended up being my preferred way of analyzing the data. As I looked at total spend and scanned purchase history in general, I was left feeling, “What am I doing with my life? I’ve bought a lot of stupid things over the years.”

But among the most expensive things I’ve bought, they’re all either still in use or were used until they wore out or were retired. Which probably makes up for my dubious purchases like rarely used fitness equipment or that bizarre snow shovel with the Ferris wheel back then, right?

Hopefully you come to the same conclusions, but no matter what nuggets you find in your Amazon purchase history, at least now you know where to find that information and how to analyze it backwards and forwards.