How to Download Your Amazon Order History Report

Have you ever wanted to download your entire Amazon order history report, or parts of it, so that you could track your spending, or find out when you purchased an item? It’s really easy to do this, but for some reason Amazon doesn’t make the process obvious. I’ll show you how, and I’ll explain the four different kinds of reports you’ll have access to.

Updates

Please see updates at the bottom of the post. Unfortunately it looks like this feature is no longer available.

Why I needed my Amazon Order History

Last year I was considering getting a Chase Amazon credit card. I’d looked into it before, but I was getting so many benefits out of travel-related credit cards that I didn’t want to switch at that time. I’m just not traveling as much anymore though, and since I’m going out less I’m even buying things like furniture online. So the time seemed right.

Still, I wanted to run the numbers and make sure that the benefit would be worth it. I do a lot of Amazon orders online, but would it be enough to make up for free hotels rooms and flights?

In order to do this, I needed to know how much I spent on Amazon in a typical year. I looked everywhere I could think of, including my Amazon Account Settings, Your Orders page, and Archived Orders, and I just couldn’t find a way to do it! I’d resigned myself to having to browse through my purchase history and add things up with a calculator.

How to download Amazon order history

But before I resorted to that, I Googled it. I don’t know why Amazon decided to hide the page I was looking for (maybe they don’t want us to realize just how much we spend there??), but at least they did link right to it in their help section!

In order to download your Amazon purchase history and other reports, you go to the Order History Reports page (you’ll be prompted to sign in to Amazon if you haven’t already), and you just have to make a few quick choices.

Report Type

You can choose from four different order history reports.

Items

In this report, all of the info is broken down by the individual items that you ordered. You’ll get info like the name of the item, how much you paid per unit, tax, how you paid for it, where it was shipped, and even tracking numbers.

If you paid anything for shipping, that information does not appear on this report. It also doesn’t include any coupons or other discounts you got that weren’t applied until checkout.

Orders and shipments

This report doesn’t list any items that you bought. Instead, everything is broken down by the order ID number. Much of the information is the same as in the Items report, but the Orders report also includes shipping charges, and coupons or other promotions that were applied to an order.

Refunds

The Refunds report tracks money that you’ve been refunded for any reason. For example, if you receive a damaged item and Amazon says that it will give you a refund, that refund will appear on the report. If you decide to return an item within 30 days because you don’t want it, that refund will also show up on the Refunds report.

Returns

The Returns report includes only items which have been physically returned to Amazon, and does not deal with prices or transactions. It will tell you things like the Order ID, the name of the item, and the reason why it was returned. If you received a refund for returning the item, that information would be on the Refunds report.

However, if you receive a damaged item and Amazon tells you it will refund your money without you having to send the item back, the refund would show up on the Refunds report, but the item will not show up on the Returns report at all.

Start and End Dates

There are some quick options to choose from, like Last Month, or you can choose from a calendar.

The longer the time frame of the report, the longer it will probably take to process.

Report Name

You can name your report anything you like. You’ll be able to see that title in the Your reports section (it will default to “Order History Report” if you don’t give it a name). However, frustratingly, when you download the report, it will not contain the title, only the dates. So you might want to rename it to something more specific as you download.

Processing time

The more information the report contains, the longer it will take to process. For example, my monthly reports are usually done in less than a minute, while bigger reports can take much longer. You don’t have to wait on the page, Amazon will send you an email when a report is ready to download.

Sometimes there is seemingly no rhyme or reason to how long the reports take. I suspect it has something to do with how busy Amazon is, because smaller reports will be completed almost instantly one day, and take a super long time the next. And sometimes they just fail altogether, and you have to try again.

[UPDATE 1/5/22: It’s worth noting that it took me five days to get my December reports to process and download. I’d been trying since the morning of 1/1/22, unsuccessfully. They would stay at 0% processing for minutes or hours, and then fail. I suspect that so many people were trying to run reports for all of 2021 that the system was just completely overwhelmed, so keep that in mind if you’re trying to download at the beginning of a new year, or even the beginning of a new month. But they did finally go through today.]

There is a column that shows the status of each report as a percentage of how much of it has processed, but it’s rather unreliable. Sometimes it stays at 0% and then suddenly is completed, sometimes it creeps upwards in real time, and other times it gets stuck until you refresh the list. In my experience, the larger the report I’m trying to run (say, for an entire year’s worth of info), the more likely I am to get percentage progress info. And at that point, I usually just close out the page and wait for an email, or I’ll drive myself nuts.

If you refresh the page using your browser’s refresh button, the page will try to download your latest completed report every time. You can avoid this by X-ing out reports after you download them, or by using the Refresh List button on the page.

And that’s it! The report will download as a .csv file (a Comma Separated Value file, which I open as an Excel spreadsheet). You can sort the info, add it up, search for purchases by name, or throw it in the fireplace to hide the evidence. The choice is yours.

Other questions

Where is my Amazon order history?

You can find it in two different places. If you just want to browse your order history, you can go to the Your Orders page. If you actually want to download your history, you can do that here.

How far back does my amazon order history go?

Mine only went back to 2006, even though my Your Orders page has orders going back to 2000. I checked my husband’s and it was the same. Then I checked my kids’ accounts, and their history report options only went as far back as their actual purchase history.

So, it appears that if you have an account from 2006 on, you can download your entire history, but if you have transactions from before 2006, you can see them on your Your Orders page, but can’t download them to a report.

Can Amazon order history be deleted?

No, it can’t. You can archive orders on the Your Orders page, but they will still be searchable, and will still show up in reports.

Is Amazon purchase history private?

Yes. The only way for someone else to see your purchase history is for them to log into your account.

The exception is if you are a teen in an adult’s Amazon Household account. The adults in the Household can see your full purchase history on the Your Orders page.

Does Amazon Household share order history?

It depends. If another adult in your Household runs a report, your purchases won’t show up, and they won’t have access to your purchase history on the Your Orders page. But if you’re one of the adults in Amazon Household, you can see purchases made by teens in your household on the Your Orders page.

Just click the dropdown in the top left under “Your Orders” and choose which account you’d like to see the orders for. Note that while clicking on a teen’s account will only show their orders, clicking on your own account will show your orders and your teens’ orders.

How did that Chase Amazon credit card work out?

Pretty amazing, actually!! There’s no fee, you usually get a pretty big gift card for signing up, and you get 5% back on just about anything you buy with the card on Amazon (2% on other purchases).

When you check out, if you have any reward credit built up, you can just check a box and use that money towards your purchase! No filling anything out, no going to a separate rewards page. It couldn’t be easier. Just like Amazon Prime itself.

Update: no longer available

Unfortunately, this feature seems to be gone completely. At first the reports just stopped working (they would download, but would be empty—thanks to commenter Benjamin for letting me know), and now they’re just unavailable altogether. What a shame, it was a really useful feature. Hopefully they’ll eventually replace it with something else, but I’m not holding my breath.