Update on Importing Amazon Orders into Google Sheets (May 2023)

Oh my, @kirsti.rehler. Personally, I had chosen to exclude the Amazon Fresh transactions because they were so voluminous and also because, as primarily grocery items, they seemed readily categorizable as “Groceries” en masse at the credit card transaction level (i.e. I don’t bother to try to itemize my Safeway purchases).

To be honest, while I think they are messy and suffocating to import, I didn’t anticipate and hadn’t seen them create problems in terms of data integrity. If you have some insights into why that happened, I would be interested to hear more.

I imagine the “panda01” transactions are showing up on the user’s credit card statements. I’m not certain how the payee would be captured— “Amazon Fresh” and “Whole Foods” seem like likely candidates.

We are all a little bit frustrated with the data quality and workflow eccentricities now that Amazon has significantly modified what they are sharing. You all have some great suggestions on how to improve this workflow. The CSV-tool had been a relatively-generic piece of code that had flags and mappings to work with many different CSV sources… and that had worked great with what Amazon was outputting. Unfortunately, their new format— especially the more limited set of fields, the unfiltered date range, the mass of Amazon Fresh transactions— really push at the margins of what is a viable general-purpose importer. Customizing the workflow for this new data set would certainly alleviate some of the frustrations. We will get to this but there are many prioritized product improvements that are currently more urgently earning the development team’s attention. Hopefully we can make this stopgap workflow work for us in the interim… or someone in the community can share something better… :wink: