(NEXSTAR) – Gift-giving can be a joyful, rewarding experience, especially after surprising a family member with the perfect present. But it’s not nearly as fun if that family member has already seen your Amazon ordering history.
As anyone with an Amazon account knows, your shopping history is readily visible to any partners, children or other household members who have access to your account. And even if they’re not actively snooping around, Amazon’s homepage often recommends products based on your past purchases or searches — a major hint for anyone expecting a gift.
Lucky for you, there are a few ways to keep your Amazon purchases private from prying eyes.
How to keep family from seeing your Amazon ordering history
The first option, and perhaps the most thorough option, is to set up separate accounts for each member of the household via Amazon Family (previously Amazon Household), a free service which allows Prime members to extend their benefits to other adults or children (ages 13 and up) at the same address.
Once you’ve invited your family to join, every member will have their own login credentials. And if you’re an adult user, no one will be able to view your shopping history.
“The bottom line is that if you use Amazon Family, all adult orders are automatically private from everyone else in the home,” Amazon writes of service.
This option, however, might not work for folks who have already ordered their holiday gifts, or people who would rather not arouse suspicion by setting up an Amazon Family account so soon before the holidays.
Other ways to obscure your Amazon activity
Unfortunately, Amazon no longer allows users to “archive” a previous order — i.e., move it from the “Orders” tab to another section where it isn’t as easily viewed. This means that anyone with access to your Amazon account can see items that have already been purchased or delivered by navigating to the “Your Orders” tab. (Amazon’s customer service webpage about “Archived Orders” suggests using Amazon Family in place of the now-removed Archive tool, despite plenty of holiday shoppers still preferring the latter.)
But if you trust that your family won’t violate your privacy by snooping in the “Orders” tab, you can at least prevent them from accidentally seeing their gift (or something like it) on the Amazon homepage: The site prominently displays items that you recently viewed or purchased on the main page, categorized under sections called “Pick up where you left off,” “Keep shopping for” and “Buy again.”
To remove items from the “Pick up where you left off” and “Keep shopping for” categories, Amazon instructs users to click the “Browsing History” link under the “Account & Lists” tab at the top right of the desktop homepage. There, you’ll be able to prevent specific items from appearing in either homepage section by selecting “Remove from view” under the product image. (On the mobile app, click the profile icon and then the “Accounts” tab, then scroll down to “Browsing history.”)
If you prefer, you can also turn off your browsing history while you shop for gifts by selecting the settings icon in the upper right of the “Browsing History” page, then clicking “More settings” and toggling it off. (You can also clear your entire browsing history here.)
To remove items from the homepage’s “Buy again” section, click the “Orders” link under “Account & Lists” and choose the “Buy Again” tab. From here, you can remove orders by clicking the item and selecting the “Remove item” option. (On mobile, you can access the “Remove item” option by navigating to the “Buy again” tab and selecting the icon — it’ll look like three dots — that appears over the item image.)
And to get rid of old search terms that still show in the dropdown of the search bar, click into the search bar and simply “X” them out.
Make sure your Echo devices don’t spoil the surprise
Amazon shoppers who own Echo devices should probably take a moment to safeguard against a member of the household overhearing an update about upcoming deliveries. To do this, users must open the Alexa app, select “More,” then “Settings,” and then “Notifications” to turn the feature off.
Then again, all of this secrecy is for naught if the recipient prematurely sees a suspicious Amazon package sitting on the porch. In that case, you may have to get your gifts delivered to an Amazon pick-up point — or just tell your nosy family to mind their own freakin’ business.