I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it was new to me, so allow me to share:
Apparently there’s a pretty easy way to see your lifetime total spending at Amazon. Just go to the “Your Account” section and click on “Download Order Reports,” then take the resulting .csv file into Excel or something similar and total it up.
Full step-by-step instructions can be found here.
My total was, uh, sobering. Ahem.
It makes it a ‘little’ better to look at the List price total and subtract the purchase price total – to see your savings – but it only helps a little 😉
Is it bad when it says “Your report is going to take a while. We will email you when it is available.”? I’m scared….
Ha! Mine did that, too. In fairness, I’ve been using Amazon for 10 years, soooooo….
Same here. And still waiting. The suspense is killing me! 😉
Yikes. I mean, I guess if I break it down into the nearly 11 years I’ve been using Amazon, it’s not so bad….right? Nah, still pretty bad! 🙂
What’s super interesting is that I could upload the data into my company’s analytics platform and create visualizations of product categories to see where I spend the most money.
$65,526.70. Seriously. In my defense, 3 years ago I started using it to buy for our school bookstore (mostly just paperbacks and snacks), plus my husband, sister, and both kids use my account for my prime. I’m not sure a day goes by without at least one order on my account. There are 1,086 orders on there. Yikes! OK, I just had to sort and see how much of it was work. $44,393. I feel a little bit better now, but we obviously spend way too much on Amazon.
Tax accountant here…it may be worthwhile to set up a separate “business” account with Amazon, particularly if your state has your school listed as tax exempt for any sales tax in your state. If the tax rate is 5%, you would have saved about $2,100 on those $44,393 of sales.
I actually download an order report for the calendar year in January. Before Amazon had a physical distribution center in Wisconsin, our tax code said you needed to pay sales tax along with your income tax, on on-line purchases. Yep, I may be the only taxpayer in the entire state to actually *do* that, but I’m also a tax accountant.
Note that it’s also helpful to have that record if there are things you purchase every so often that you can’t always remember the exact search term for (printer ink refills, that special type of hand soap, whatever…). You find it in your saved report, highlight the name and paste it into Amazon’s search field. If they still have it, it will come up.
I have been ordering from amazon for 20 years….back when it was just a bookstore online…I wonder how far back this data goes?
I’m too scared to look. I’m betting I could send one or both of my kiddos to college for the $ I’ve spent on Amazon!
In Excel, it’s even easier to find the sum by selecting the cell below the last entry in the “purchase price” column, and then to click “autosum” rather than trying to follow the instructions on Business Insider.
As an aside, my total was 14,000 since February 2006. I am consoling myself by noting that I saved 9000 off of the list price of all those items!
I figured this would be horrifying, but after seeing everyone else’s totals, I’m a positively conservative Amazon shopper at “only” $2646 since 2006. I know I was a member before then, must have used a different email address or something previously.
I think we’ve established that they simply don’t let you go back any further.
And yes, take heart. My total was 5 figures!
One thing it looks like isn’t accounted for in the total in the items report – if you returned anything it won’t show up as giving you that money back. I see that a pair of shoes I returned for a different size shows up twice with the same purchase price and item total even though I obviously only paid that amount once.
So for those of us that like to take advantage of amazon’s return policy, your total is lower than it looks.
I am doing something wrong since the total won’t show in my Excel program after typing in the =(SUM…) dohicky. Oh, well. It might be better that I don’t know!
Wow! Hah. I am taking heart in what I know I saved… Also it is SO neat to see my purchases start at books my freshman year of college and end with toilet paper, as a married homeowner. Really fun to look back even at some of the silly gifts and sweet items I’ve purchased over the years. I sure do love Amazon!