If you shop on Etsy on a regular basis, you might want to see your purchase history to visit a shop that you bought from in the past, or to grab a digital download that you didn’t get right away.
So how do you find your previous purchases on Etsy?
Your purchase history on Etsy is located in your account section. By clicking on your account, then clicking on “purchases and reviews” in the dropdown menu, you’ll be able to access your purchase history. Only registered users will see this information, so if you checked out as a guest there won’t be a record on Etsy of your previous purchases. To retrieve guest purchase records, you would need to look in the email that you used to find the receipts that were sent at the time of purchase.
There are other things to know about your purchase history as well, including who else can see it and how long it’s stored!
Table of Contents
- What’s kept in the purchase history on Etsy?
- How long is your Etsy purchase history stored?
- Can you delete your Etsy purchase history?
- Can people see your Etsy purchase history?
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What’s kept in the purchase history on Etsy?
The purchase history is where you’ll find a record of all of your past purchases on Etsy.
It has a record of everything that was ever purchased using the registered account, plus any digital downloads that were purchased.
If you want to print out a receipt for a previous purchase you’ll be able to do that in your purchase history.
You’ll also be able to access any digital files that you didn’t download right away because they stay with the order information in the purchase history section.
The purchase history also has a button at the top that will sort your orders based on whether they’ve shipped or not.
You can also track packages and send a message to the shop owner if you need help with your order from this page.
Each order will have a separate section for the information that’s specific to that order so that you can manage them easily.
To see the full Artisan Shopping Directory sections, including signups for discounts, click here.
How long is your Etsy purchase history stored?
Etsy keeps a record of every purchase you made on Etsy and doesn’t delete them after a certain period of time. The purchases need to be associated with a registered account, though, so if orders are placed using different accounts, the purchase history information will remain separate. And if the item was purchased using the guest checkout, it won’t be included in the purchase history at all.
To go through your Etsy orders, just go to your purchases and reviews page and scroll down. I went and looked to see my history, and I have 18 pages of purchases dating back to 2011.
The first thing I ever bought on Etsy was some tangerine soap from a shop that isn’t even on Etsy anymore as far as I can tell:
You’ll be able to see everything that you purchased by going through these pages.
If anything is missing, you might have bought it using the guest checkout or an account that’s associated with an email address that’s different from the one you’re using.
Can you delete your Etsy purchase history?
At this time there’s no way to delete your Etsy purchase history. If you bought something using the account that you’re logged in under, you’ll be able to see it on those pages, and you can’t edit it.
The only way to completely delete the purchase history would be to delete the entire account, which is a drastic step to take.
If you’re a buyer who wants to delete their account you can do this by going to your account, clicking on Account Settings, then scrolling down to the “close your account” section.
This will give you instructions about suspending your account temporarily, or deleting it permanently, which is done from the privacy tab. (Click here for a more in-depth article about deleting an Etsy account.)
You’ll be able to shop on Etsy again using the guest checkout, and there won’t be a history of your purchases stored if you prefer that.
You can also create a new Etsy account using a different email to shop with a clean purchase history if you want to start over for some reason.
If you’re an Etsy seller I don’t recommend deleting your account entirely. You can use the close account option to suspend your account temporarily, and you’ll be able to open it back up later.
Deleting the account is the nuclear option and is really not needed for most situations.
Can people see your Etsy purchase history?
Your Etsy purchase history is private unless you are logged into your account. Once logged in, the purchase history can be seen anyone who is using the computer that’s logged into the account. Making sure to log out after every session on Etsy will prevent people from seeing your account information and purchases.
One reason that I can think of for not wanting people to see your purchase history is for the purpose of keeping gifts secret.
If you’re buying a gift for someone
who’s a snooper, and you know that they’ll try to figure out what you got them, the easiest way to avoid them figuring it out is to use guest checkout while you’re not logged into Etsy at all.
The reason that you shouldn’t log in is to prevent Etsy from showing you things when you come back later, as well as not keeping a record of your purchases.
When you look at something on Etsy it will show it in “recently viewed” listings on the homepage the next time you log into that account.
If you REALLY want to be careful, use an incognito window that doesn’t keep a record of your activity. Do that by clicking the three dots at the top right of the browser window and choosing “private browser” or “incognito browser.”
Anybody who comes along after you won’t be able to see anything that you were looking at.
Doing that will open up a window for you that won’t save any of your activity.
Go to Etsy, shop and check out as a guest, and the only record will be a receipt that’s sent to the email you put in at checkout and on your credit card.
If you really want to be careful, make sure to do something to hide the email receipt from the snooper too. If someone is determined to snoop they’ll probably be able to snoop in your email!
Don’t totally delete the receipt, though, because guest checkout sends the tracking information in that email, it won’t be stored anywhere on Etsy.