[HN Gopher] Download a CSV of your Amazon purchases
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       Download a CSV of your Amazon purchases
        
       Author : daenz
       Score  : 91 points
       Date   : 2021-07-31 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.amazon.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.amazon.com)
        
       | zrail wrote:
       | 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).
        
         | jimktrains2 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | zrail wrote:
           | Naw this was _one item_. One shipment. One package. It's the
           | strangest thing.
        
         | evilpie wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | zrail wrote:
           | Wait it does? I've never been able to reverse that ID.
        
             | evilpie wrote:
             | The memo starts with something like "123-0000000-1234567
             | Amazon.de". The corresponding link would be https://www.ama
             | zon.de/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=123-0...
        
               | zrail wrote:
               | Ah. US credit card transactions have an id that looks
               | like a hash, presumably because card charge descriptors
               | have such a short maximum length.
        
         | Chico75 wrote:
         | 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
        
         | beastie29a wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | sk55 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | YuriNiyazov wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | mavsman wrote:
       | 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
        
       | throwslackforce wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | danuker wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | bloopernova wrote:
           | PGP signed CSV would work :)
        
             | kenniskrag wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | marcinzm wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | LanternLight83 wrote:
       | 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).
        
       | jasode wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | cyberge99 wrote:
         | Maybe the older data is stored in Glacier. Give it a few days
         | to run the report.
        
       | progval wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | blibble wrote:
         | their GDPR dump utility contains all of the information here ,
         | admittedly in annoying format... seems to be the database table
         | directly as json)
        
           | notpachet wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | pranavjoneja wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | post_break wrote:
       | Last time I did this and calculated how much I've spent it hurt.
        
       | fallingknife wrote:
       | Says report failed when I try.
        
         | naga_n wrote:
         | 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
        
       | submeta wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | sitkack wrote:
         | I would think Germany would have a standardized digital receipt
         | of transaction in xml that retailers would be required to
         | provide.
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-31 23:00 UTC)