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Most of us have spent quite a bit of money on Amazon over the years, especially during the pandemic. If you’re curious about exactly how much money you’ve ever spent in your Amazon account, there’s a way to check the total.
Why review your Amazon purchase history?
For some people, careful tracking of purchases is part of their business operations. In fact, the tools we’ll be using in the how-to part of the article are designed for business use, but we’re borrowing them to dig into our purchase histories.
For the rest of us, though, 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 dig even deeper into your Amazon purchase history to help sort out all sorts of trivia.
If you’ve ever wondered how much you’ve spent in total on Amazon, what your most expensive purchase was, how much you spend each year on your last-minute Amazon-centric Christmas shopping spree, or anything else that can be quantified and sorted about your habits of Amazon spending, you can dig in and find out.
How to see the totals of your purchases on Amazon and more
We can’t analyze data we don’t have, so the first step is to get your Amazon purchase data in a way that’s easy to sort through and analyze. Paging through years of purchases in the standard Amazon order history interface and adding things up by hand isn’t enough.
Request your Amazon order purchase history
While logged into your Amazon account on a computer (not the app on your phone or tablet), navigate to the Order History Reports menu.
You can jump directly to the menu using this URL. You can do this by clicking on “Accounts and Lists” and then selecting “Accounts” from the dropdown menu.
On your main account page, scroll down to the “Order and Purchase Preferences” section and click “Download Order Reports.”
Once you’re on the resulting “Order History Reports” subpage, 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 view of your Amazon history and give us the ability to answer questions like how much you’ve spent over the years, we need to request multiple reports.
First, you must request an “Items” report with a start date that corresponds to your first purchase on Amazon and end with the current date. This will generate a report, in a Comma Separated Values (.CSV file) spreadsheet format, showing each individual purchase and associated data.
Second, you must request additional reports for the “Refunds” report type. You can omit the “Returns” report type request because the returns data only shows items physically returned to Amazon, does not include the monetary amount, and does not include data. on items for which you received a refund but did not return an item (such as getting a refund for a damaged or lost shipment).
If you have an Amazon account with a long history of purchases, please note that you may have to wait minutes to hours for the request to complete.
In some cases, you may even end up with a failed report request. If that happens, we recommend splitting the dates of your purchase history. So instead of asking for an item report that goes from 01/01/1999 to present, pick a point in the middle and split it as 01/01/1999 to 12/31/2011 then 01/01/2012 until the present . You’ll get two reports, but they’re just simple spreadsheet data that you can combine.
How to Analyze Your Amazon Purchase History
Once you have the CSV files, it’s simply a matter of opening them in your spreadsheet application of choice and using some basic spreadsheet functions like adding and sorting to extract 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” spreadsheet and “Refunds” spreadsheet loaded, here are some interesting questions you can answer about your Amazon purchase history and how to answer them.
The format of these Amazon purchase history spreadsheets has remained very consistent over time, with reports we’ve mined in points over the years using the same formatting conventions. In the following instructions, we will reference the column letter and title in the confidence that it will look the same to you, but adjust the instructions to reflect any changes to the column layout.
What was the first thing you bought on Amazon?
You can look on the Regular Orders page in your Amazon account to see the first thing you bought from Amazon. Or, in the item spreadsheet, you can sort column A, “Order Date” using the AZ sort function. The top entry must be the first purchase. In my case, it is the textbook that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.
RELATED: How to view the first Amazon purchase you’ve ever made
How many Amazon orders have I placed?
The number of Amazon orders you’ve placed on Amazon is the total number of lines in the “Items” spreadsheet minus one (because one row of the spreadsheet is the headers at the top). If your spreadsheet has 1,295 lines, for example, you’ve played 1,294 orders on Amazon.
If you want to know how many orders you’ve placed, without returns and refunds for shipping damage and such, you can also subtract the same value (number of lines minus one) found in the “Refunds” spreadsheet from your total orders.
How much have I spent on Amazon?
To get an accurate look at how much you’ve spent on Amazon over the years, we need to use the SUM function to add two values: how much you’ve paid Amazon and how much you’ve been reimbursed.
First, on the “Items” spreadsheet, you need to locate column AD, “Item Total.” This column indicates what you actually paid including tax. Other spreadsheet columns, such as column M “Purchase price per unit” show the price before tax, and column L “List price per unit” shows the list price, not the actual price .
Scroll down to the bottom of the column and create a simple sum function in your spreadsheet app like =SUM(AD2:ADX) where the final value X is the value of the last row of data, such as AD1209 . The resulting value is the sum of the column and represents the total amount of money you have paid Amazon.
Now repeat the process by creating a SUM function on the “Refunds” report. Because the refund report provides the purchase price refund and the tax refund in separate columns, we must combine them. Scroll to the bottom and merge column J “Refund Amount” with column K “Refund Tax Amount” using the function =SUM(J2:JX, K2:KX) where did you replace the X with the number of the final row, like J40 Y K40 .
Now simply subtract the purchase value and tax refund from the total value we just created in the “Items” spreadsheet. If your total purchase history reaches $20,000 and your total refund history reaches $1,600, then the total amount you actually spent on Amazon is $18,400.
What items were gifts?
This particular question is a bit difficult to answer because not every gift you bought on Amazon was necessarily shipped by Amazon to the recipient.
You may need to sift through the data and look for purchases made on holidays you celebrate, such as family birthdays, Christmas, or other gift-giving holidays, to really dial it in.
But if you use Amazon a lot to send gifts to friends and family across the country, you’re in luck. You can sort column T, “Shipping Address Name,” to sort all of your Amazon shipments by their recipient’s name. Then drop your own name and look at everything you’ve sent to everyone else.
What is the most expensive thing I have bought on Amazon?
To find the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought on Amazon, you can choose to sort by price before or after tax. However, before you do, it’s a fun game to try and guess what you think the item is. I, for example, assumed that the most expensive thing I had ever bought on Amazon was probably a GPU, a high-end monitor, or some other equally expensive tech kit.
Once you’ve guessed, simply sort column AD “Item Total” (for price after tax) or column M “Purchase Price Per Unit” (for price before tax) with the ZA sort function to display the highest value at the top of the page.
A high-end GPU and monitor were, in fact, among my top 10 most expensive purchases, but it turns out the top two things were an ultralight wheelchair for my father-in-law and a premium saddle-style window air conditioner. conditioner.
Of all the rankings I did, I have to say that ranking by most expensive purchases ended up being my favorite method of analyzing the data. When I looked at the total money spent and overall purchase history, I was left with the feeling, “What am I doing with my life? I’ve bought a lot of dumb things over the years.”
But among the most expensive things I’ve bought, they’re all still in use or used until worn out or retired. Which I guess makes up for my more dubious purchases, like rarely used fitness equipment or that time I bought that weird snow shovel with the giant wheel, right?
Hopefully you’ll come to the same conclusions, but whatever nuggets you find in your Amazon purchase history, at least now you know where to find this information and how to parse it back and forth.
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