How to hide your Amazon order history

There are a lot of reasons why sharing an Amazon account is a great idea. You only need to pay for one membership to access to all of the benefits Amazon offers with Prime, including free one-day delivery, Prime Video, unlimited photo storage, Amazon Music membership, Prime reading, and more. You can even add multiple delivery addresses and payment options to a single account, so the majority of the time it’s no problem to share an account with someone else.

What if you want to buy something for the person you share an Amazon account with, however? Whatever you order from Amazon is going to appear in your list of orders, which both of you can see. If the other person finds out what you’ve ordered, the surprise is ruined.

The good news is that it’s possible to move specific Amazon orders out of the main list of orders and squirrel them away so they’re out of sight. If you’re purchasing something on Amazon for someone you share an account with, then here’s all you need to know about how to hide Amazon orders.

Who can see my Amazon orders?

If you share your account with another person in your household, by default any purchases you make will be visible in the Your Orders section of the Amazon website or app. As a result, if you buy something as a surprise for the person who you share accounts with, they’ll be able to see the order.

There’s no way to completely remove an order from your Amazon account. However, you can choose to archive an order. This moves it from the Your Orders section to a separate archive that isn’t immediately visible on the Your Orders page. As long as the person you’re hiding the order from doesn’t go looking for it, they shouldn’t stumble across the items that you’ve ordered from unless they’re looking for an archived order themselves. You can archive up to 500 orders.

How to archive Amazon orders on desktop

The easiest way to archive an Amazon order is through the desktop website. There’s no direct way to archive an order in the Amazon mobile app — though there’s a workaround we’ll detail later.

1. Navigate to Amazon and sign in to your account.
2. In the menu bar, click Accounts & Lists.
3. Select Your Orders. All unarchived orders are visible in this section.
4. To hide an order, click View Order Details in the header for that order.
5. Next to the details for your order, click the Archive Order button at the bottom of the list of options.
6. Click Archive order to confirm.
7. The item will be removed from the Your Orders view and placed in the archive.
8. Any other items that were part of the same order will also be archived.

How to see archived Amazon orders on desktop

Archiving your orders hides them from sight, but what if you want to find your archived orders again? You can search for archived orders in the Your Orders section of the website. Once again, this is only possible on the desktop site; there’s no option to bring up archived orders on the mobile app.

1. Sign in to the Amazon website.
2. Click Accounts & Lists in the menu bar.
3. Select Your Orders.
4. Click the Orders placed in dropdown; by default, this should read past three months.
5. At the very bottom of the options, click Archived Orders.
6. You can now see all of the orders that you’ve archived.
7. To unarchive an order, click View order details and click the Unarchive Order button.
8. The archived order will now be visible on the Your Orders page again.

How to archive and unarchive Amazon orders on mobile

There’s no option to archive an order within the Amazon mobile app. However, it is possible to archive an order on iPhone or Android by opening the desktop version of the website in your browser of choice, rather than using the app.

1. Open the browser on your phone and sign in to the Amazon website.
2. On Chrome, tap the Three Dots icon and select Request desktop site.
3. On Safari, tap the AA icon to the left of the address bar and select Request desktop site.
4. Once the desktop version of the Amazon website opens, follow the steps from one of the sections above to archive or unarchive your orders.

How to hide Amazon orders on Alexa

Even if you hide Amazon orders in the archive, there’s still a chance that your surprise could be spoiled by Alexa giving the game away. Alexa can announce information about your current orders, including dispatch and delivery information, as well as information about the products that you’ve ordered. If you have an Alexa smart display, such as an Echo Show 10, the orders can even be visible on the screen. If you want to keep a purchase secret, you’ll need to ensure that these notifications don’t include the names of your products.

1. Open the Alexa app.
2. Tap More at the bottom of the screen.
3. Select Settings.
4. Tap Notifications.
5. Select Amazon Shopping.
6. Under Say or Show Item Titles ensure that For items in delivery updates, For items in return updates, and Including items in your shopping basked marked as gifts, or those that might be gifts during major holidays are all toggled off.
7. Any Alexa notifications for your Amazon purchases will no longer say or show the name of the product; the product image will also be hidden.

How to create an Amazon Household to keep accounts separated

If hiding anything you buy as a surprise seems like a lot of hassle, or you’re worried that the person you’re buying for may sneakily go looking to see what you’ve bought them, then there is a way for you and another adult to share all the benefits of a Prime account, but still keep two separate Amazon accounts, so that the other person won’t be able to see anything that you’ve ordered. An Amazon Household account allows you to share your Prime benefits with one other adult who can access them through their own account.

1. Visit the Amazon Household page and sign in to your account.
2. To share your Prime benefits with another adult, scroll down and click the Add Adult button.
3. Enter the name and email of the person you want to add to your household.
4. Click Continue.
5. Alternatively, if the person is with you, click Sign up together on this device and follow the on-screen instructions.
6. Once you have added another adult, they can sign in to their own account and have access to all of your Prime benefits, without needing a Prime subscription of their own.
7. You can only add one other adult to your household. Once you’ve added an adult, you won’t be able to add another without first removing the current household member from your household.