Gift-giving brings immense joy, especially when you manage to surprise a loved one with a spot-on present. However, the excitement can dwindle if your family member has already caught wind of your purchase through your Amazon account.

For those familiar with Amazon, it’s common knowledge that your shopping history is easily accessible to anyone sharing your account. Whether it’s a partner, child, or other household member, they can inadvertently or deliberately come across hints of their gift. Even without deliberate snooping, Amazon’s homepage tends to suggest items based on your previous searches or purchases, providing a potential spoiler for any upcoming gift surprises.

Fortunately, there are strategies to ensure your Amazon purchases remain discreet, away from curious eyes.

How to keep family from seeing your Amazon ordering history

A highly effective method is utilizing Amazon Family, formerly known as Amazon Household. This service, available at no extra cost to Prime members, allows the creation of separate accounts for each person within the household. It caters to both adults and children aged 13 and above residing at the same address.

By setting up individual accounts through Amazon Family, each family member gains their own login details. This separation ensures that adult users can shop freely without worrying about anyone else seeing their purchase 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.