What does AMZN Mktp mean on your bank statement?

AMZN Mktp US*2H49K8TL3 for $23.87. You know you shop at Amazon. You do not know what this particular $23.87 was.

Mktp is short for Marketplace. It means the thing you bought came from a third-party seller rather than from Amazon itself, and Amazon collected the money on that seller's behalf. So the charge is real, it's from your Amazon account, and the reason the seller's name isn't on it is that Amazon never puts it there. Every marketplace order in the US looks identical on a statement apart from the amount and that alphanumeric tail.

Which is why matching them up is annoying, and why you're here.

The other Amazon descriptors, briefly

Amazon splits its charges across several descriptors, and knowing which is which narrows things down fast. AMZN Mktp US is a physical item from a third-party seller. Amazon.com (sometimes AMZN.com/bill) is an item sold by Amazon directly. AMZN Digital covers Kindle books, app purchases and Prime Video rentals. Amazon Prime is the membership itself, annual or monthly. Prime Video Channels is a subscription you added inside Prime Video — Paramount+, a Starz add-on — billed by Amazon. Amazon Web Services is cloud hosting, and if you're not a developer and you see it, that one's worth a proper look.

Outside the US the pattern holds with a country tag: AMZN Mktp CA, AMZN Mktp DE, and in the UK usually AMAZON.CO.UK or AMZN MKTP UK.

Why one order shows up as three charges

This is the biggest single source of "I don't recognise this Amazon charge", and it isn't a mistake.

Amazon charges you when items ship, not when you order. If your basket had four items from three different sellers with three different warehouses, that's three shipments on three days, and three separate charges. Your order confirmation email said $86.40. Your statement says $19.99, $23.87 and $42.54. Nothing is wrong — the total just got sliced along shipment lines.

Two knock-on effects. The dates won't match your order date, sometimes by a week or more if something was backordered. And a partial refund or price adjustment lands as its own separate line later, which makes the arithmetic look stranger still.

How to match a charge to an actual order

Go straight to Amazon's transactions page. It's at amazon.com/cpe/yourpayments/transactions, or from the menu: Your Account → Payments → Transactions. It's not the same as Your Orders, and it's the one most people have never opened.

That page lists charges the way your bank sees them, with the descriptor, the amount, the card's last four digits, and a link to the order each one belongs to. If your statement says AMZN Mktp US*2H49K8TL3, the same reference appears on that page next to the order it came from. Copy the tail, hit Ctrl+F, done.

A few things that come up when you actually do this:

• Check the card's last four digits on each row. If you have more than one card on file, or a partner shares the account, this is where the mystery usually dissolves.
• Amazon Household purchases by the other adult on the account bill to whichever payment method they've selected — which may well be yours. Their orders won't appear in Your Orders. They will appear in Transactions.
• If the Transactions amount is smaller than the statement amount, look for a nearby gift-card balance line. Amazon applies gift-card balance before card, and topping up a balance is its own charge.

Once you've got a year of these to reconcile rather than one, the page-by-page approach stops working. If you want the whole statement as a spreadsheet you can sort and filter, Tabula is free and open source and will pull tables out of a text-based PDF, though you'll be tidying columns by hand afterwards. Our own statement converter goes a step further by translating descriptors like AMZN Mktp and SQ* into the actual merchant and flagging anything that repeats monthly. Either way, having the year in one sheet is what turns "what was this $23.87" into a question you can answer with a filter.

When it's actually a subscription

A decent share of recurring Amazon charges come from things nobody consciously signed up for as a subscription.

Subscribe & Save is the main one. It bills as a normal marketplace charge, so a monthly delivery of coffee pods or dog food or razor blades looks exactly like a one-off purchase, month after month. You manage those at Your Account → Subscribe & Save Items.

Then there's Audible, Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Video Channels, all of which live in different corners of your account settings. Prime Video Channels is worth a specific check: those add-ons are easy to start during a free trial and easy to forget, and they bill under a descriptor that reads like Amazon rather than like the channel you were actually trialling. Our guide to finding forgotten subscriptions covers the systematic version of this hunt.

If it genuinely isn't yours

Work through it in this order. Check Transactions for that exact amount. Check who else uses the card and who else is on the Household. Check whether it's a shipment from an older order rather than a new purchase.

If none of that lands, and the charge doesn't appear in your Amazon Transactions at all, then it isn't an Amazon account problem — it's a card problem. Somebody has your card number and is spending it at Amazon. Call your bank, not Amazon, and get the card replaced. Amazon can't cancel a charge made through an account that isn't yours. Our step-by-step on what to do about an unauthorized charge has the full order of operations, and the Amazon charges page covers every Amazon descriptor variant in one place.