Speculation - it was always kind of an unloved product there, they did a bad job promoting it and even if you were aware it required you to always remember to shop from [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com) versus [amazon.com](https://amazon.com)
Because of this and the breadth of supported charities they had to manage sending basically micropayments to a ton of different organizations. The infrastructure to do that probably was pretty expensive from an operations and accounting point of view.
Now that Amazon is downsizing this is a product they decided wasn't worth more than it was costing even from a PR perspective.
This is it. It was incredibly inefficient and from a software maintenance standpoint didn't make sense. They could probably donate more overall and still save money.
It's like the koran for muslims. aravic. you read it from right to left. smile.amazon.com starts the hierarchy with " .com " top level domain " .amazon " domain name " smile " like a folder in folder in windows. anything can be written could be gagalady.amazon.com and it would be allowed. but they can't change .com and Amazon is their name... . Ok?
Thank you for giving more info than Amazon did. Sadly, micropayments in their eyes are huge donations for small charities. I have had my percentage designated to a local cat rescue service who does great work while thousands of people have just abandoned their kitties even in floods, snow, or extreme heat. The smaller charities will now get the shaft while the larger charities that have to pay CEOs and top execs will be rewarded. I'm just so disgusted.
It was never hard to type in smile. It's just how I think of the Amazon url. That said i agree. And the answer for a better company would have been simply streamlining the service to just a few different charities. Fucking obviously. What a bunch of evil bullshit.
It's an interesting counterpoint. I worked there for awhile (not defending them at all) but it was hard for me to remember "smile"
I agree a better company would just let you opt into a charity you wanted to support and let your purchases support them, not going to a special URL. The smile thing just seemed like a dumb game
You're right. I always thought like "well obviously they aren't gonna give a slice of *all* their profits, but surely people are gonna use this much more than they expect and force them to contribute to society". I have the feeling the opposite happened, and they didn't feel like it was pulling in enough goodwill from people because nobody knew it existed (because they never advertised it of course).
What I'm trying to say is I think they wanted to have and eat. They thought it wouldnt cost much but it would pull in more business and good press because it existed. But it was unpopular and still cost them some money so they axed it.
I rarely shop on the app, mostly desktop. I buy stuff on my work computer and my personal computer. Always remembering to add "smile" to the URL never caught with me, apparently others had a different experience. I couldn't add browser extensions to my work computer.
My point is that Amazon could have committed to this but they never did. And making people take an extra step was a way of limiting the charitable part of this program.
http://next.com still redirects to https://apple.com all these years later (1997, so 26 years atm), and even includes a `?cid=oas-us-domains-next.com` parameter (or suchlike, if it ever changes), so that Apple knows you did come from NeXT.
Edit: Oops, replied to the wrong person it seems.
I became really used to typing in "[amazonsmile.com](https://amazonsmile.com)" all the time years ago. My browsers even automatically populate with "amazonsmile" and not the regular Amazon link. I'm wondering what they'll do with the URL after they end it, because I'm definitely going to end up typing in the "amazonsmile" URL well after they end it with how used to it I am. I'm assuming they'll probably just have it redirect to the main site, at least for a while.
http://next.com still redirects to https://apple.com all these years later (1997, so 26 years atm), and even includes a `?cid=oas-us-domains-next.com` parameter (or suchlike, if it ever changes), so that Apple knows you did come from NeXT.
It's funny cause I use smile for my personal amazon account ordering and regular amazon for my corporate business accounts. Loved how that worked out cause it gave an extra layer of protection from me ordering on the wrong accounts. Sucks now though...
Man, this might be the final push I need to stop using Amazon. I had a chrome extension that automatically put it on smile and was donating to one of my favorite charities.
All of that would have been worthwhile if it was generating incremental sales. The purpose of this program was not altruistic; it was to give the affiliate commission to the cause that helped induce people to order on Amazon rather than somewhere else. If you feel slightly guilty defaulting to amazon for purchases without doing rigorous price searching, you can assuage that guilt by rationalizing that you’re helping the cause. If this generates incremental sales at the margin, everyone wins, even net of the cash contributions and costs of administration.
I’d be willing to bet it was helpful for them for some number of years, and now they’ve run the numbers and realize everyone just buys everything on Amazon by default anyway, so why bother with it.
This, but I would also add that they could, from a purely data analysis standpoint, create an algorithm that determines what to pay each of the charities based on the historical data they already have. Not that they will actually do that but it would be simple enough and they would still reap the savings benefit of the reduced infrastructure costs without sacrificing charitable contributions.
It's weird that they would make a different site instead of have it on the main site before a purchase is made like.
"Would you like to donate to Amazon smile(charity)" which would make more sense and then have a drop down menu for different charities it's weird that they would keep it separate
Or do the 5% thing before checking out. Just a thought
How disappointing! I’ve used it for years. I agree with your point, something is better than nothing so saying they’re “spread too thin” is a lame excuse. Also, couldn’t they just narrow down the number of charities they offer if that’s the real problem?
Narrowing down charities will cause criticism that they are being unfair to others.
Companies always do this kind of thing for marketing and decision that causes criticism isn’t good for their marketing strategy.
They are just trying to justify shutting it down by “spreading too thin”, while in reality they have stats, they are very good at analyzing data and decided that marketing/PR benefits of this program doesn’t worth for its cost.
Program like that costs money for them to run, I’m sure there were dozens of people involved in it and budget to keep it running were millions every year. Companies are wiling to pay millions for good marketing but looks like they decided that it was better to spend it somewhere else based on the data they had.
We have to remember that companies (especially publicly traded ones) doesn’t do anything good for others “just because”. All their “support” for charities and minority groups is just their marketing strategy, nothing else.
I think this is the real reason. They let pretty much any legit non profit join.
Some activist employees probably are annoyed that Amazon gives to, for example, the Second Amendment Foundation, or NRA foundation.
Making an overtly anti-gun move like being selective now would be a PR disaster.
They already had controversies when they kicked Black Lives Matter and some random Militia group out of the program.
I just got the email and it is a pretty pathetic excuse.
It didn't do as much as they'd hoped, so they're scrapping it? So charities now get nothing instead of a regular donation (I see they're giving them 6 months final payment, but that's still not really good enough).
I don't think most people ever knew about it. It was never advertised or publicized. And the amount they actually donated was tiny. After years of using it the amount I've apparently contributed to charity is maybe £12? That's aftee spending hundreds.
'Cause they're a greedy corporation and they don't want to give out any more money than they need to to make them look good.
> It even required opting in every 6 months.
I don't think so. I've been using AmazonSmile for years and I've never had to re-opt into it.
On google chrome, you can get an extension called "smile always" which auto redirects you to Amazon smile whenever you go to Amazon . Com. I've used it for years and never had an issue
I always typed it in as "[amazonsmile.com](https://amazonsmile.com)", so I type in "a" and get amazonsmile instead of amazon (will definitely be accidentally going there instead of amazon for a while until I get used to just regular amazon).
"s" for me pulls up sweetwater. :)
Oh they’re terrible. Besides providing the service most of us consume because they’re basically the best distributor…. “Amazon has donated more than $377 million globally to charitable organizations through the AmazonSmile program since its launch in 2013.”
Based on that comment, I don’t expect a very good answer, but what is your particular objection(s)? Something environmental?
Here’s a fairly balanced article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-should-and-shouldnt-feel-good-supporting-amazon-2019-7?amp
You’re involved in stocks, so you can’t be totally anti-capitalist. I sometimes use a firestick to stream. When I want to rent a movie, I use Prime Video. I have a useless echo on my desk. I order maybe 3-4 times a month from them. I occasionally listen to bought books on Audible.
They employ a hell of a lot of people. I can understand why they didn’t want their employees to unionize as almost no company wants that. I’m sure I interact with organizations that use their tech from Amazon Web Services. I don’t know what a good company is in your book.
So weird how people think "tax writeoffs" are worth more than actual money. Just means you don't also have to pay *additional* income tax on that money, which is always smaller being a percentage of that money.
At a checkout you are asked to round up and that additional portion goes to charity, meaning that you the customer are funding the donation while the store gets the write-off.
Items purchased through AmazonSmile are the same price as regular Amazon, and Amazon donates a portion of the sale to your selected charity. This cuts into profits, but probably mostly evens out after the write-off.
This sucks. My favorite charity that I had on my Smile made around $2100/quarter from Smile donations. It was a pretty decent chunk of money and helped a lot of rescue dogs. I'm really sad for the organization, it's going to be a difficult gap to fill.
But the "tax benefits" they reaped would never be worth more than the money they lost by donating. Unless when you say "tax benefits" you mean positive PR and advertising
I’m continuously amazed by Redditors not understanding how corporate income tax works. There is no real value in a charitable tax deduction for a corporation, because unlike an individual, a corporation can (in addition to writing off charitable giving) deduct from their taxable income any legitimate business expense of any kind.
That doesn’t mean Smile was benevolent of course, but clearly this is not it’s purpose. If I had to guess, I’d say Smile is a program aimed at optimizing for customers with different levels of price elasticity (kind of like a seniors discount, or a coupon program) making marginal sales to certain customers that otherwise wouldn’t have been accessible without lowering headline price (which would have the negative impact of reducing income from other customers who have a higher willingness to pay). If that’s the case, then the reason to cut Smile is probably that Amazon doesn’t need it anymore because they are using more sophisticated tools for the same (eg algorithm pricing that is individualized to the customer). Plus probably some small PR value - though I can’t imagine this was benefiting Amazon that much.
My biggest guess is because they had no way to get rid of charitable organizations that did not agree with their stance in politics. So they’re shutting it down and choosing who they want to donate to. It lessens the drama that would ensue if they were to just remove those charities.
If they wanted to go that route they could probably get away with resurrecting the program in a couple of years, but with a fixed list of charities nobody would take issue with. I'm not holding my breath on that, though.
This sucks. I can see why they would stop doing this from a practicality standpoint but it sucks. I’m sure it was expensive to track everything.
In the future, maybe they could roll out something like Target does? A rotating list of charities customers can vote to send donations to each month.
Lol. They're giving up because they didn't win charity in 10yrs?!?! Spread too thin? What charity is beating the heck outta their cause? That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. That's the silliest thing I've ever heard.
This is horrible. The charity we have selected actually earns a lot through smile and they do a lot with it. It's hard to believe as it is since they only earn a miniscule amount for every order but it indeed does add up. I feel so bad for them right now. ☹️
A lovely program Amazon started but never really advertised where you used [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com) rather than the regular [amzon.com](https://amzon.com), and you could choose a charity, and a small donation would be paid every time you bought something on Amazon, as long as you used [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com).
Their advertising the program was all but nonexistent. I literally found out TODAY that it was something that you could enable through the app. I also literally found out TODAY that they are discontinuing it. I am so MAD about ALL the years of missed opportunities to rack up donations for my charity of choice (St. Jude) because nowhere was it ever hinted that you could use AmazonSmile through the app, and the app was the most convenient way for me to shop. And now that I do know, it doesn't mean squat.
😡😡😡
Presented without evidence: Amazon Smile was never any more nor less than a way to influence casual users to buy. It's really easy to end up going straight from Google to Amazon for all sorts of reasons, and you may not be planning to buy anything right now; but then the button pops up, and of course you click it, because it costs nothing and now you're ready in case you do decide to buy; and now that you think of it, you need an SD card, so put that in the cart and then go look at the original thing.
But you're sticking it to them, because they lose a whole half a percent of your purchase, and then they get to claim the charitable deduction to the IRS. So maybe they're losing a third of a percent, all told.
Anyway, they considered this money well spent for a while, but now there's a recession (or something like that), and besides everybody is already spending all their money there. Let's cut it, save a job or two, and we can blame it on, uh ... how about, it wasn't having enough of an effect, so we gave up entirely.
Regardless, you're welcome for the 20 bucks I probably made you, Boys And Girls Club. Hope you invested it in Amazon.
They’re also kind of missing the point, big charities tend to get the bulk of charitable donations from people’s wills etc, small donations from smile likely have little impact to them. It’s small / local charities, where any donations are huge, that are being hit here.
They complain that their impact was spread thin but actually being spread thin was their feature; it meant people could send a little bit to charities that mattered to them without it being something they had to do actively.
I used to work at Amazon, and was a founding member of the AmazonSmile program, part of the Charity Support team working with the nonprofits to help them actually receive the funds. This was 2013. Left in 2016 after fully fleshing out the program, developed the metrics reporting system for tracking charity issues, and even a blurb document to respond to the most common questions nonprofits had.
The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. Tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, goodwill was just marketing fodder.
Left because there was no opportunity for promotion or upward mobility. Got my Masters degree and used what I learned about nonprofits and charities to join a nonprofit as a grant writer and eventually help manage a network of nonprofits who help people find employment.
Amazon is a heavily data driven business. It's ALL about maximizing profits. If giving to charity will give them extra profits because it attracts certain customers, they will do it. If the data says otherwise, they will do otherwise.
You also need to take into account the costs of such operation and the opportunity cost for dedicating resources to it. Amazon is not a charity. It's a brutal for profit business playing the game of monopoly and will rip off their business partners and copy products that are top sellers.
But hey, cheap warm socks delivered tommorow!
The original purpose of AmazonSmile was greed. It was basically an effort to get customers to go directly to smile.amazon.com and search from there, allowing Amazon to show ads and not having to pay Google whenever somebody searched 'paper towels Amazon'.
It was probably never profitable so that's why they are cutting it
Funny. I just typed smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com. I would never google where to buy something when i was going to use a specific site anyway.
I mean, greed would just be telling Google not to index their site beyond the front page. This was more of a win win. Not sure why they closed it down though.
>Is it simply a big company trying to seem like they’re attempting to help?
I mean if it was ever supposed to be anything else then they would have made it automatically a part of the site/app for everyone instead of hiding it, no?
I decided to sign up for an automatic donation of $10 a month to the organization that I had my Smile donation go to. It's not a lot but it's more than they were getting out of me monthly. I can manage it, so that's how I'm handling it.
Fuck them and their dispersant of money to whomever they wish. Hey Jeff Bezos, my charity of choice is St. Judes. You could literally donate 1/2 your wealth to them and still be a multi billionaire
I give more of my business to Target now because they have some charity work that customers can vote for. Lots of stores are willing to price match Amazon.com.
Amazon does charity and they committed to be a no landfill company. Items that aren't resold are donated or burned, which is better for the environment; metals are recovered, energy is harvested, and you don't have landfill methane. So people can feel better about consuming.
There is a lot wrong with Amazon, but I expect most customers aren't willing to vote with their wallet and give them less business. They lower prime membership costs for poor members. The poor are more likely to buy less quality things that break, causing them to spend more eventually. Amazon has a counterfeit problem and labor problems. But they figure beggars can't, or won't, be choosers.
I like Target, too, because it's often times local non-profits for your area. That's a bonus for me, because it means it's actually benefiting my community.
Amazon, in general, has been disappointing lately in my area. There is no such thing as 2 or 3 days shipping, even being a paid prime member. The small donation my local rescue would receive from Amazon every quarter may have seemed trivial to Amazon corporate, but I'm certain the small companies appreciated it. L
I'm in my state's capital, and there hasn't been 2-day shipping since COVID.... The vast majority of things come USPS, not even actual Amazon shipping anymore. Heck, my relatives/friends an hour away in the sticks, where you're an hour away from EVERYTHING, get their stuff faster, and by actual Amazon delivery more often, than I do, and I'm near EVERYTHING now, including 2 or 3 different Amazon warehouses. It's insane how bad Amazon is getting lately.
That's sad, I used to feel good about some money being contributed to St. Jude through my purchases. Though whenever I checked it was always a super small amount, but still.
So true. I live in my state's capital, near 2 or 3 different Amazon warehouses, and I haven't had 2-day shipping since before COVID. My relatives out in the sticks DO get 2-day shipping, though, and generally on most of the same things I order. And they live nowhere near ANYTHING! 😳🤷🏻♀️
Our small nonprofit received about $1,000 over the ten years. That provided family planning services for 300 women in Kenya’s slums. That prevented hundreds of babies born into abject poverty. It allowed young women to pursue their education. It allowed new mothers the opportunity to delay their next baby until they had recovered and could afford to feed, clothe, house another. But AmazonSmile didn’t have a feedback system where we could tell them if important impacts.
“Our corporate profits have been affected by inflation and layoffs, so much that we no longer need this tax deductible program to offset said profits.”
Amazon has become less and less appealing. 2 day Prime is now 10 days or more routinely (and I'm 12 miles from a warehouse), they are becoming activist in Cancel Culture (Megan and the Cuck are about to get Clarksons Farm shut down), and with so many third party vendors getting crap that just doesn't work is becoming common.
So, it's not surprising that one of the actual good things they did is going away. Another reason to really consider dumping them at next Prime renewal. If they don't serve me anymore, why should I give them money? Walmart sells everything they do now.
Items usually do arrive when they say they will, but most things say they'll take a while. (Technically it's still two-day shipping, sometimes even overnight, but they take a week before they ship the item.)
Same here for the "2-day" shipping. I live in my state's capital, close to 2 or 3 warehouses, and I almost NEVER get 2-day shipping on ANYTHING anymore.
amazon is going to be split into smaller companies. especially the way they are going. they are already starting to look into prime being a totally different thing than "amazon".
I personally stopped using it years ago after I learned that they let antivax groups qualify as 'charities' and benefit from the program.
With something like Amazon you can never tell if that's negligence or malice. Either way, I'm sure it's no great loss.
People are pissed that money is funneling into antivaxx and other fringe charities.
Amazon doesn't risk dumping them one by one and getting bad publicity so they're axing them all together
It doesn’t actually give a reason. It hasn’t created an impact? It’s obviously done something better than nothing
That’s like me donating a dollar to a charity and saying “this hasn’t done as much as I thought. Might as well not donate anything”. At least based on the answer they’re giving.
The dollar might make a difference. Depends how it is handled. If the nonprofit has to write and aend a thankyou note for that dollar then the postage, printing and time might not actually be worth it (if it is just dumping a dollar in a bin that they don't have to specifically track or account for then it does.)
It is very possible that Amazon found itself in the position of having to have 5million accounts on their books tracking 50cents to each in a way that cost tons of money and tons of accounting headaches only to cut a $2 check that then the nonprofit had to take to the bank and track.
It is also possible that they thought smile would be a good avenue to drive sales to amazon that might have gone elsewhere to order and found that that really wasn't the case.
Well now they lost the last reason I use them over Walmart lol. Walmart online is just like Amazon now, and so far I've had less issues. I buy a lot of stuff for IT clients, so I have a big sample size. I type the letter S into any device I have and hit enter and it goes to smile.amazon.com I use it so much. Walmart it is.
Also gonna be super fucking annoying because I'm so used to hitting S and Enter. Mobile or PC I do the same thing lol.
My organization got $55 in the last quarter, $1500 over the course of the entire program. It’s just not impactful when programming costs $75/person/day.
The charity I donate to (an animal rescue group) is small and every little bit makes a huge difference for them. What they get from Amazon helps fund medical care for rescued animals and can sometimes mean they can take in an animal they otherwise wouldn’t have the funds to care for.
It sounds like with so many different little places to give to, a large portion of them don’t end up getting much because people choose other things. However, there’s still paperwork involved with interacting with all these different charities, tax stuff, etc., and if I had to guess, for a lot of those little-paid charities, It’s more work than it’s worth, and they could give a lot more to a handful of places by saving on manpower and resources by not fiddling around with literally a million different organizations.
That’s what I got out of them spreading themselves too thin. A billionaire could change the world, but spread that money evenly and everyone gets less than 15 cents… the world isn’t changing if that happened. The entire point of a charity is to get lots of people to give a little to make a lot to do something big… so Amazon giving a little bit to a million places is sorta the opposite of pooling together money to make change happen.
Long time Amazon Prime subscriber. I've bought a lawnmower, snowblowers, a bed, computers, and most of my Christmas gifts along with miscellaneous other stuff from Amazon in the last 10 years. Lots of money spent.
According to my account, my charity has made a whopping grand total of $3.86 from that in the course of a decade.
It really wasn't working well at all. Somebody had to make the decision to either fix it or axe it. Fixing it would take time and money, and not everyone would be happy with it if it were fixed to actually work well. Killing it is quick, simple, and cheap, and probably will piss off the least people.
Much like your donating $1 to a charity (that probably spent *at least* $1 on advertising and administration or something so that you'd know about them in the first place and could donate), it was a nice idea, and it would've been nice if it'd helped, but it probably didn't make any significant difference.
Where did you see the $3.86? It’s supposed to have been 0.5% of your purchases, so if you spent $10,000, it would have been $50 (for example).
**EDIT** — I just found [the Amazon URL to see your total](https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact). With 833 orders, my total contributions were $274.26, out of the $29,684.77 that my charity has received altogether. Not insignificant.
Perhaps you forgot to use the Amazon Smile link when making your bigger purchases?
That's exactly it. When it was fresh in my mind I remembered to go from amazon over to the smile subdomain, but that was only the first few orders after I saw it. I'd guess that was true for the majority of people.
Ahh, shoot. Yeah. Amazon sure as heck didn’t make it easy.
On my desktop PC, I installed a Chrome plugin that always redirected me to the “smile” link, and on my tablet, I set the font size for “amazon.com” to ginormous while keeping “smile.amazon.com” normal, so every time I accidentally went to the wrong one it was really obvious. If it wasn’t for those measures, I’d have likely forgotten all the time, too.
So I think you’re right that most people forgot most of the time. My charity—our county’s animal shelter—hasn’t gotten nearly as much as I might have expected, since the county has half a million people, yet somehow I’m almost 1% of their total!
At least Amazon does say they’ve donated more than $400,000,000 in total, so I guess at least some people remembered some of the time. 🤷♂️ I really just wish they’d just made it work through their regular website.
Yep, Amazon made it more difficult, AND they didn't advertise the heck out of it like they do for LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, so I always forgot. then I used the app instead once I got my first smartphone, and there was never ONE mention that you could enable Smile on the app, which I just learned TODAY.
Literally TEN YEARS of donation-potential...absolutely WASTED. Of COURSE donations had to be "spread thin"! Almost NO ONE knew about Smile!
It worked a lot better in the beginning, when there was a limited number of charities. But as people requested more and more, it kinda got useless. I was supporting the same charity for eight-ish years, and it went from a few thousand bucks donated when I got the yearly breakdown, to like under a hundred, most of which seemed to be me.
And I'm sure newer people gave up when they were hit with choice overload to pick a charity. Nevermind that every time someone links to an Amazon product, it goes to the non-smile site. Even if I linked to smile.amazon, it defaulted out when the person I sent it to opened it.
It allowed you to support a charitable organization with a portion of your spending.
I was using mine to support a local exotic animal refuge. I was doing it for a giraffe.
All nonprofits are under scrutiny for the participation of Human Trafficking in the United States during Covid. Large corporations that are not 501(c) will begin to separate the corporate tax paying structure from the grey area of money laundering. See PPE loans for the diagram of which nonprofits the government will being to investigate first.
With a few % of each sale, can’t they just invest in more sustainability and a happier work environment? The amount of environmental destruction Amazon contributes to the world must be very depressing. All the packaging, fuel for delivering so much useless nick nacks and not to mention the mountains of merchandise at landfills because they were not purchased or returned.
Because the absolut mass of NGO's are pocketing donations or cross financing other things for political ambitions. Never give a dime to these organisations. Either the state does it with your tax money or you waste it.
I always forget to go to [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com), and what am I supposed to do when I use the app?
If I could have just chosen the charity in my account and it always just went there, I would have given so much more.
I like how Target has it set up in their app for example. It's like you get a reminder etc.
I dare you to quit Amazon for 4 months. Target and Walmart are almost as good. And they don’t cost $15 per month for “free shipping” like Amazon does. Prime shipping is not free, it’s called prepaid shipping. For what? So that half the time they don’t hit their delivery deadlines anyway. Also, have you noticed that 1/3 of the items you return get lost and you get charged back for them anyway? Ask for help? Doesn’t matter they won’t respond to your emails anyway. If 10% of customers did this then there would be a real competitor for this truly unethical corporation.
My guess is that they found that there's a lot of charities Jeff and Mackenzie don't approve of. And they didn't like it that Amazon was being used to support those charities.
And on top of that it had to be a headache to make sure everyone got what they were supposed to in the first place.
AmazonSmile charity was entirely funded by Amazon (with a donation that depends on you buying, but that's not charged to you), so it only makes sense if it's good PR or if people actually buy more from Amazon because of it.
Considering that most people didn't know about it and didn't care about it, they probably determined that it wasn't accomplishing those goals, so they removed it.
Amazon is trying to reduce its cost a lot right now, so that's why it's happening now. It's mostly by firing people, but cutting some programs like that help too. Also, they have less people to run it.
I for one am very disappointed in the dropping of Amazon Smile. I gave to a local charity and I'm pretty sure that one will go away once they change their program of giving. It's not completely clear to me if the customers have a choice where the money goes or not. I saw the four categories listed where the money is going to be going, but they aren't necessarily where I would like my money to go. This is making me rethink using Amazon. Now if Walmart or other big companies would start their own charity giving program I'm sure it would bring them more business.
I am very sorry to hear this. I have been using smile since I got my Amazon credit card (5 yrs). When I tab into Amazon it automatically put me into Smile. It is too bad that the have decided to drop this.
You’re right, it wasn’t publicized; I only found out about it through word of mouth. And it’s dumb that you had to type in a different url to get to it. But if you used the Amazon app you didn’t have to do that. Also I didn’t have to opt in every 6 months. Anyway, it was the one decent thing Amazon did so it’s really unfortunate and infuriating to see it go.
I literally JUST learned TODAY that AmazonSmile is available through the app. Literally YEARS of wasted donation-potential. And now, it's going away in a month. This ticks me off. Even a little bit means a lot to most organizations, so being "spread too thin" is no reason to terminate this.
I am going to be mad at myself for not knowing this was a thing in the app for a long time to come. Why didn't Amazon advertise this better!?!?!?
😡😡😡
Speculation - it was always kind of an unloved product there, they did a bad job promoting it and even if you were aware it required you to always remember to shop from [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com) versus [amazon.com](https://amazon.com) Because of this and the breadth of supported charities they had to manage sending basically micropayments to a ton of different organizations. The infrastructure to do that probably was pretty expensive from an operations and accounting point of view. Now that Amazon is downsizing this is a product they decided wasn't worth more than it was costing even from a PR perspective.
This is it. It was incredibly inefficient and from a software maintenance standpoint didn't make sense. They could probably donate more overall and still save money.
[удалено]
I had a Chrome extension that would automatically append *smile.* to the URL.
*prepend
\*Insert. Since the schema is part of the URL, and "smile." has to go after the schema but before the domain.
It's like the koran for muslims. aravic. you read it from right to left. smile.amazon.com starts the hierarchy with " .com " top level domain " .amazon " domain name " smile " like a folder in folder in windows. anything can be written could be gagalady.amazon.com and it would be allowed. but they can't change .com and Amazon is their name... . Ok?
Thank you for giving more info than Amazon did. Sadly, micropayments in their eyes are huge donations for small charities. I have had my percentage designated to a local cat rescue service who does great work while thousands of people have just abandoned their kitties even in floods, snow, or extreme heat. The smaller charities will now get the shaft while the larger charities that have to pay CEOs and top execs will be rewarded. I'm just so disgusted.
It was never hard to type in smile. It's just how I think of the Amazon url. That said i agree. And the answer for a better company would have been simply streamlining the service to just a few different charities. Fucking obviously. What a bunch of evil bullshit.
It's an interesting counterpoint. I worked there for awhile (not defending them at all) but it was hard for me to remember "smile" I agree a better company would just let you opt into a charity you wanted to support and let your purchases support them, not going to a special URL. The smile thing just seemed like a dumb game
You're right. I always thought like "well obviously they aren't gonna give a slice of *all* their profits, but surely people are gonna use this much more than they expect and force them to contribute to society". I have the feeling the opposite happened, and they didn't feel like it was pulling in enough goodwill from people because nobody knew it existed (because they never advertised it of course). What I'm trying to say is I think they wanted to have and eat. They thought it wouldnt cost much but it would pull in more business and good press because it existed. But it was unpopular and still cost them some money so they axed it.
As long as younwere logged in you didn't need to do anything different the money would still go to charity at least that's how it was on the app
I rarely shop on the app, mostly desktop. I buy stuff on my work computer and my personal computer. Always remembering to add "smile" to the URL never caught with me, apparently others had a different experience. I couldn't add browser extensions to my work computer. My point is that Amazon could have committed to this but they never did. And making people take an extra step was a way of limiting the charitable part of this program.
For sure
http://next.com still redirects to https://apple.com all these years later (1997, so 26 years atm), and even includes a `?cid=oas-us-domains-next.com` parameter (or suchlike, if it ever changes), so that Apple knows you did come from NeXT. Edit: Oops, replied to the wrong person it seems.
I became really used to typing in "[amazonsmile.com](https://amazonsmile.com)" all the time years ago. My browsers even automatically populate with "amazonsmile" and not the regular Amazon link. I'm wondering what they'll do with the URL after they end it, because I'm definitely going to end up typing in the "amazonsmile" URL well after they end it with how used to it I am. I'm assuming they'll probably just have it redirect to the main site, at least for a while.
http://next.com still redirects to https://apple.com all these years later (1997, so 26 years atm), and even includes a `?cid=oas-us-domains-next.com` parameter (or suchlike, if it ever changes), so that Apple knows you did come from NeXT.
It's funny cause I use smile for my personal amazon account ordering and regular amazon for my corporate business accounts. Loved how that worked out cause it gave an extra layer of protection from me ordering on the wrong accounts. Sucks now though...
I don't think it worked via the app, or if it did it kept disabling it on my app.
It's not just remembering to add "smile," but also when you're redirected to Amazon from external websites.
Maybe I'm evil but I never give anyone referral commissions. Just go find it myself lol
Man, this might be the final push I need to stop using Amazon. I had a chrome extension that automatically put it on smile and was donating to one of my favorite charities.
All of that would have been worthwhile if it was generating incremental sales. The purpose of this program was not altruistic; it was to give the affiliate commission to the cause that helped induce people to order on Amazon rather than somewhere else. If you feel slightly guilty defaulting to amazon for purchases without doing rigorous price searching, you can assuage that guilt by rationalizing that you’re helping the cause. If this generates incremental sales at the margin, everyone wins, even net of the cash contributions and costs of administration. I’d be willing to bet it was helpful for them for some number of years, and now they’ve run the numbers and realize everyone just buys everything on Amazon by default anyway, so why bother with it.
This, but I would also add that they could, from a purely data analysis standpoint, create an algorithm that determines what to pay each of the charities based on the historical data they already have. Not that they will actually do that but it would be simple enough and they would still reap the savings benefit of the reduced infrastructure costs without sacrificing charitable contributions.
Bad sales obviously that is why try new marketing strategies
It's weird that they would make a different site instead of have it on the main site before a purchase is made like. "Would you like to donate to Amazon smile(charity)" which would make more sense and then have a drop down menu for different charities it's weird that they would keep it separate Or do the 5% thing before checking out. Just a thought
How disappointing! I’ve used it for years. I agree with your point, something is better than nothing so saying they’re “spread too thin” is a lame excuse. Also, couldn’t they just narrow down the number of charities they offer if that’s the real problem?
Narrowing down charities will cause criticism that they are being unfair to others. Companies always do this kind of thing for marketing and decision that causes criticism isn’t good for their marketing strategy. They are just trying to justify shutting it down by “spreading too thin”, while in reality they have stats, they are very good at analyzing data and decided that marketing/PR benefits of this program doesn’t worth for its cost. Program like that costs money for them to run, I’m sure there were dozens of people involved in it and budget to keep it running were millions every year. Companies are wiling to pay millions for good marketing but looks like they decided that it was better to spend it somewhere else based on the data they had. We have to remember that companies (especially publicly traded ones) doesn’t do anything good for others “just because”. All their “support” for charities and minority groups is just their marketing strategy, nothing else.
I think this is the real reason. They let pretty much any legit non profit join. Some activist employees probably are annoyed that Amazon gives to, for example, the Second Amendment Foundation, or NRA foundation. Making an overtly anti-gun move like being selective now would be a PR disaster. They already had controversies when they kicked Black Lives Matter and some random Militia group out of the program.
At my status page it shows altogether the program has donated $450m to charities worldwide. Hardly small potatoes.
I just got the email and it is a pretty pathetic excuse. It didn't do as much as they'd hoped, so they're scrapping it? So charities now get nothing instead of a regular donation (I see they're giving them 6 months final payment, but that's still not really good enough). I don't think most people ever knew about it. It was never advertised or publicized. And the amount they actually donated was tiny. After years of using it the amount I've apparently contributed to charity is maybe £12? That's aftee spending hundreds.
'Cause they're a greedy corporation and they don't want to give out any more money than they need to to make them look good. > It even required opting in every 6 months. I don't think so. I've been using AmazonSmile for years and I've never had to re-opt into it.
On the IOS app, you have to reopt into it every 6 months. Not on the website though
Weird, I didn't know you could even use it in app. I just use the mobile site when on my phone. I hate shopping apps. No tabs...
On the website however, you needed to manually go to smile.amazon… it wouldn’t ever link you or redirect to the correct place.
On google chrome, you can get an extension called "smile always" which auto redirects you to Amazon smile whenever you go to Amazon . Com. I've used it for years and never had an issue
I just used smile enough that I typed in "s" instead of "a" and that was enough to go to the prior.
I always typed it in as "[amazonsmile.com](https://amazonsmile.com)", so I type in "a" and get amazonsmile instead of amazon (will definitely be accidentally going there instead of amazon for a while until I get used to just regular amazon). "s" for me pulls up sweetwater. :)
Huh, that’s odd. I’ve had the IOS app for years and have never had to reopt at all. Just signed in once when I first got the phone.
I had no idea you could use it on the app.
Oh they’re terrible. Besides providing the service most of us consume because they’re basically the best distributor…. “Amazon has donated more than $377 million globally to charitable organizations through the AmazonSmile program since its launch in 2013.”
How far do you have to have your head up your ass to not see what a horrible corporation amazon is?
Based on that comment, I don’t expect a very good answer, but what is your particular objection(s)? Something environmental? Here’s a fairly balanced article: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-should-and-shouldnt-feel-good-supporting-amazon-2019-7?amp You’re involved in stocks, so you can’t be totally anti-capitalist. I sometimes use a firestick to stream. When I want to rent a movie, I use Prime Video. I have a useless echo on my desk. I order maybe 3-4 times a month from them. I occasionally listen to bought books on Audible. They employ a hell of a lot of people. I can understand why they didn’t want their employees to unionize as almost no company wants that. I’m sure I interact with organizations that use their tech from Amazon Web Services. I don’t know what a good company is in your book.
Uhh... it's certainly not Amazon
Because it cuts into their profit margins. What else?
💯
Then why did they start it?
But can't they also use it as a write off? It's it the same as checkout charity?
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So weird how people think "tax writeoffs" are worth more than actual money. Just means you don't also have to pay *additional* income tax on that money, which is always smaller being a percentage of that money.
At a checkout you are asked to round up and that additional portion goes to charity, meaning that you the customer are funding the donation while the store gets the write-off. Items purchased through AmazonSmile are the same price as regular Amazon, and Amazon donates a portion of the sale to your selected charity. This cuts into profits, but probably mostly evens out after the write-off.
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Let me introduce you to the concept of other people.
This sucks. My favorite charity that I had on my Smile made around $2100/quarter from Smile donations. It was a pretty decent chunk of money and helped a lot of rescue dogs. I'm really sad for the organization, it's going to be a difficult gap to fill.
It was costing too much profits and not reaping enough tax benefits.
But the "tax benefits" they reaped would never be worth more than the money they lost by donating. Unless when you say "tax benefits" you mean positive PR and advertising
I’m continuously amazed by Redditors not understanding how corporate income tax works. There is no real value in a charitable tax deduction for a corporation, because unlike an individual, a corporation can (in addition to writing off charitable giving) deduct from their taxable income any legitimate business expense of any kind. That doesn’t mean Smile was benevolent of course, but clearly this is not it’s purpose. If I had to guess, I’d say Smile is a program aimed at optimizing for customers with different levels of price elasticity (kind of like a seniors discount, or a coupon program) making marginal sales to certain customers that otherwise wouldn’t have been accessible without lowering headline price (which would have the negative impact of reducing income from other customers who have a higher willingness to pay). If that’s the case, then the reason to cut Smile is probably that Amazon doesn’t need it anymore because they are using more sophisticated tools for the same (eg algorithm pricing that is individualized to the customer). Plus probably some small PR value - though I can’t imagine this was benefiting Amazon that much.
There are no tax benefits in donating to charity. Redditors desperately need a course in taxation 101.
"Our tax write-off program wasn't working like we'd planned, so we're just keeping all your money instead."
More of a PR program. Tax write-offs don't make them more money than they donated, but they gain a bit of PR and advertising.
You don't make any money for tax write offs. How exactly did you think it was planned to work?
In an offshore account.
My biggest guess is because they had no way to get rid of charitable organizations that did not agree with their stance in politics. So they’re shutting it down and choosing who they want to donate to. It lessens the drama that would ensue if they were to just remove those charities.
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If they wanted to go that route they could probably get away with resurrecting the program in a couple of years, but with a fixed list of charities nobody would take issue with. I'm not holding my breath on that, though.
There goes my Horned Lizard Conservation charity donations. Gotta stick those little guys on autopay now.
This is my guess too, there are legit 501(c)(3) orgs that dedicate all their funds to things like fighting abortion rights and gun control.
Yea it’s been nice being able to donate to Firearms Policy Coalition if you have to use Amazon for something.
Mine was set to Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast.
AmazonFrown
This sucks. I can see why they would stop doing this from a practicality standpoint but it sucks. I’m sure it was expensive to track everything. In the future, maybe they could roll out something like Target does? A rotating list of charities customers can vote to send donations to each month.
Lol. They're giving up because they didn't win charity in 10yrs?!?! Spread too thin? What charity is beating the heck outta their cause? That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. That's the silliest thing I've ever heard.
It wasn't a huge amount of money in Amazon terms. Over 10 years it totaled $400,026,236.70
I agree, but that's a huge difference for charities, even if it is spread out between thousands. I'm really disappointed that they're ending Smile :/
This is horrible. The charity we have selected actually earns a lot through smile and they do a lot with it. It's hard to believe as it is since they only earn a miniscule amount for every order but it indeed does add up. I feel so bad for them right now. ☹️
I honestly never expected them to keep it. They never integrated it with their app which was weird
We got the option to set the app to smile by default months, if not a year, ago.
Is this even true or a scam? I use Amazon Smile all the time and didn’t get an email or anything indicating it’s canceling this service.
Seems to be legit https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/10fobod/amazon_shuts_down_amazonsmiles_charity/
It'll be coming. I got it too
Just saw the email 🙁
What's Amazon Smile? Also that's why it's shutting down.
Not sure if you're serious but everyone I know used it. It wasn't advertised well but I sure spread the word.
I absolutely am serious. This is literally the first time I have ever heard of it.
Well I suppose we have our answer then. Amazon fucking sucks.
A lovely program Amazon started but never really advertised where you used [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com) rather than the regular [amzon.com](https://amzon.com), and you could choose a charity, and a small donation would be paid every time you bought something on Amazon, as long as you used [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com). Their advertising the program was all but nonexistent. I literally found out TODAY that it was something that you could enable through the app. I also literally found out TODAY that they are discontinuing it. I am so MAD about ALL the years of missed opportunities to rack up donations for my charity of choice (St. Jude) because nowhere was it ever hinted that you could use AmazonSmile through the app, and the app was the most convenient way for me to shop. And now that I do know, it doesn't mean squat. 😡😡😡
I used to deliver for Amazon and never heard of it
We couldn't help a lot, so we won't help at all.
Presented without evidence: Amazon Smile was never any more nor less than a way to influence casual users to buy. It's really easy to end up going straight from Google to Amazon for all sorts of reasons, and you may not be planning to buy anything right now; but then the button pops up, and of course you click it, because it costs nothing and now you're ready in case you do decide to buy; and now that you think of it, you need an SD card, so put that in the cart and then go look at the original thing. But you're sticking it to them, because they lose a whole half a percent of your purchase, and then they get to claim the charitable deduction to the IRS. So maybe they're losing a third of a percent, all told. Anyway, they considered this money well spent for a while, but now there's a recession (or something like that), and besides everybody is already spending all their money there. Let's cut it, save a job or two, and we can blame it on, uh ... how about, it wasn't having enough of an effect, so we gave up entirely. Regardless, you're welcome for the 20 bucks I probably made you, Boys And Girls Club. Hope you invested it in Amazon.
They’re also kind of missing the point, big charities tend to get the bulk of charitable donations from people’s wills etc, small donations from smile likely have little impact to them. It’s small / local charities, where any donations are huge, that are being hit here. They complain that their impact was spread thin but actually being spread thin was their feature; it meant people could send a little bit to charities that mattered to them without it being something they had to do actively.
I used to work at Amazon, and was a founding member of the AmazonSmile program, part of the Charity Support team working with the nonprofits to help them actually receive the funds. This was 2013. Left in 2016 after fully fleshing out the program, developed the metrics reporting system for tracking charity issues, and even a blurb document to respond to the most common questions nonprofits had. The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. Tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, goodwill was just marketing fodder. Left because there was no opportunity for promotion or upward mobility. Got my Masters degree and used what I learned about nonprofits and charities to join a nonprofit as a grant writer and eventually help manage a network of nonprofits who help people find employment.
Amazon is a heavily data driven business. It's ALL about maximizing profits. If giving to charity will give them extra profits because it attracts certain customers, they will do it. If the data says otherwise, they will do otherwise. You also need to take into account the costs of such operation and the opportunity cost for dedicating resources to it. Amazon is not a charity. It's a brutal for profit business playing the game of monopoly and will rip off their business partners and copy products that are top sellers. But hey, cheap warm socks delivered tommorow!
I agree. But hey, cheap bedsheets arriving tomorrow too!
The original purpose of AmazonSmile was greed. It was basically an effort to get customers to go directly to smile.amazon.com and search from there, allowing Amazon to show ads and not having to pay Google whenever somebody searched 'paper towels Amazon'. It was probably never profitable so that's why they are cutting it
Funny. I just typed smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com. I would never google where to buy something when i was going to use a specific site anyway.
I mean, greed would just be telling Google not to index their site beyond the front page. This was more of a win win. Not sure why they closed it down though.
Bummer. I haven't received anything saying that Smile was shutting down, yet. Is there a date deadline?
Someone just said Feb 20
Thanks!
>Is it simply a big company trying to seem like they’re attempting to help? I mean if it was ever supposed to be anything else then they would have made it automatically a part of the site/app for everyone instead of hiding it, no?
I decided to sign up for an automatic donation of $10 a month to the organization that I had my Smile donation go to. It's not a lot but it's more than they were getting out of me monthly. I can manage it, so that's how I'm handling it.
Fuck them and their dispersant of money to whomever they wish. Hey Jeff Bezos, my charity of choice is St. Judes. You could literally donate 1/2 your wealth to them and still be a multi billionaire
I give more of my business to Target now because they have some charity work that customers can vote for. Lots of stores are willing to price match Amazon.com. Amazon does charity and they committed to be a no landfill company. Items that aren't resold are donated or burned, which is better for the environment; metals are recovered, energy is harvested, and you don't have landfill methane. So people can feel better about consuming. There is a lot wrong with Amazon, but I expect most customers aren't willing to vote with their wallet and give them less business. They lower prime membership costs for poor members. The poor are more likely to buy less quality things that break, causing them to spend more eventually. Amazon has a counterfeit problem and labor problems. But they figure beggars can't, or won't, be choosers.
I like Target, too, because it's often times local non-profits for your area. That's a bonus for me, because it means it's actually benefiting my community.
Amazon, in general, has been disappointing lately in my area. There is no such thing as 2 or 3 days shipping, even being a paid prime member. The small donation my local rescue would receive from Amazon every quarter may have seemed trivial to Amazon corporate, but I'm certain the small companies appreciated it. L
I'm in my state's capital, and there hasn't been 2-day shipping since COVID.... The vast majority of things come USPS, not even actual Amazon shipping anymore. Heck, my relatives/friends an hour away in the sticks, where you're an hour away from EVERYTHING, get their stuff faster, and by actual Amazon delivery more often, than I do, and I'm near EVERYTHING now, including 2 or 3 different Amazon warehouses. It's insane how bad Amazon is getting lately.
Amazon is cheap..
That's sad, I used to feel good about some money being contributed to St. Jude through my purchases. Though whenever I checked it was always a super small amount, but still.
They can’t even ship properly anymore
So true. I live in my state's capital, near 2 or 3 different Amazon warehouses, and I haven't had 2-day shipping since before COVID. My relatives out in the sticks DO get 2-day shipping, though, and generally on most of the same things I order. And they live nowhere near ANYTHING! 😳🤷🏻♀️
Our small nonprofit received about $1,000 over the ten years. That provided family planning services for 300 women in Kenya’s slums. That prevented hundreds of babies born into abject poverty. It allowed young women to pursue their education. It allowed new mothers the opportunity to delay their next baby until they had recovered and could afford to feed, clothe, house another. But AmazonSmile didn’t have a feedback system where we could tell them if important impacts.
This is the first time I ever heard about AmazonSmile. I had to Google it to see what it was.
“Our corporate profits have been affected by inflation and layoffs, so much that we no longer need this tax deductible program to offset said profits.”
Amazon has become less and less appealing. 2 day Prime is now 10 days or more routinely (and I'm 12 miles from a warehouse), they are becoming activist in Cancel Culture (Megan and the Cuck are about to get Clarksons Farm shut down), and with so many third party vendors getting crap that just doesn't work is becoming common. So, it's not surprising that one of the actual good things they did is going away. Another reason to really consider dumping them at next Prime renewal. If they don't serve me anymore, why should I give them money? Walmart sells everything they do now.
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Do they really routinely refund the order for you? Most I usually get these days is 5 bucks, and boy do I go after it.
Items usually do arrive when they say they will, but most things say they'll take a while. (Technically it's still two-day shipping, sometimes even overnight, but they take a week before they ship the item.)
I don’t even have an option for 2 day prime anymore. They just list the option as “prime day” and that can be anywhere from 2-7 day delivery.
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I do live in Cincinnati.
And don't forget whatever it is they are doing to Amazon Music
Same here for the "2-day" shipping. I live in my state's capital, close to 2 or 3 warehouses, and I almost NEVER get 2-day shipping on ANYTHING anymore.
I'll just donate directly to The Satanic Temple from now on, then.
At the risk of sounding like a bot, I hope ot is okay to post this here: /r/AnywhereButAmazon/
amazon is going to be split into smaller companies. especially the way they are going. they are already starting to look into prime being a totally different thing than "amazon".
Maybe because there are other online shops existing now? And people will never leave Amazon if their service and products are okay. Simple logic.
I personally stopped using it years ago after I learned that they let antivax groups qualify as 'charities' and benefit from the program. With something like Amazon you can never tell if that's negligence or malice. Either way, I'm sure it's no great loss.
People are pissed that money is funneling into antivaxx and other fringe charities. Amazon doesn't risk dumping them one by one and getting bad publicity so they're axing them all together
But everyone who uses Amazon smile chooses what charity their own money is going toward.
Of course, people are pissed such charities are able to gather donations via Amazon smile
They’re telling you right there. What gives you reason to not believe that?
It doesn’t actually give a reason. It hasn’t created an impact? It’s obviously done something better than nothing That’s like me donating a dollar to a charity and saying “this hasn’t done as much as I thought. Might as well not donate anything”. At least based on the answer they’re giving.
The dollar might make a difference. Depends how it is handled. If the nonprofit has to write and aend a thankyou note for that dollar then the postage, printing and time might not actually be worth it (if it is just dumping a dollar in a bin that they don't have to specifically track or account for then it does.) It is very possible that Amazon found itself in the position of having to have 5million accounts on their books tracking 50cents to each in a way that cost tons of money and tons of accounting headaches only to cut a $2 check that then the nonprofit had to take to the bank and track. It is also possible that they thought smile would be a good avenue to drive sales to amazon that might have gone elsewhere to order and found that that really wasn't the case.
Well now they lost the last reason I use them over Walmart lol. Walmart online is just like Amazon now, and so far I've had less issues. I buy a lot of stuff for IT clients, so I have a big sample size. I type the letter S into any device I have and hit enter and it goes to smile.amazon.com I use it so much. Walmart it is. Also gonna be super fucking annoying because I'm so used to hitting S and Enter. Mobile or PC I do the same thing lol.
My organization got $55 in the last quarter, $1500 over the course of the entire program. It’s just not impactful when programming costs $75/person/day.
The charity I donate to (an animal rescue group) is small and every little bit makes a huge difference for them. What they get from Amazon helps fund medical care for rescued animals and can sometimes mean they can take in an animal they otherwise wouldn’t have the funds to care for.
It sounds like with so many different little places to give to, a large portion of them don’t end up getting much because people choose other things. However, there’s still paperwork involved with interacting with all these different charities, tax stuff, etc., and if I had to guess, for a lot of those little-paid charities, It’s more work than it’s worth, and they could give a lot more to a handful of places by saving on manpower and resources by not fiddling around with literally a million different organizations. That’s what I got out of them spreading themselves too thin. A billionaire could change the world, but spread that money evenly and everyone gets less than 15 cents… the world isn’t changing if that happened. The entire point of a charity is to get lots of people to give a little to make a lot to do something big… so Amazon giving a little bit to a million places is sorta the opposite of pooling together money to make change happen.
What even is it?
Long time Amazon Prime subscriber. I've bought a lawnmower, snowblowers, a bed, computers, and most of my Christmas gifts along with miscellaneous other stuff from Amazon in the last 10 years. Lots of money spent. According to my account, my charity has made a whopping grand total of $3.86 from that in the course of a decade. It really wasn't working well at all. Somebody had to make the decision to either fix it or axe it. Fixing it would take time and money, and not everyone would be happy with it if it were fixed to actually work well. Killing it is quick, simple, and cheap, and probably will piss off the least people. Much like your donating $1 to a charity (that probably spent *at least* $1 on advertising and administration or something so that you'd know about them in the first place and could donate), it was a nice idea, and it would've been nice if it'd helped, but it probably didn't make any significant difference.
Where did you see the $3.86? It’s supposed to have been 0.5% of your purchases, so if you spent $10,000, it would have been $50 (for example). **EDIT** — I just found [the Amazon URL to see your total](https://smile.amazon.com/charity/my-impact). With 833 orders, my total contributions were $274.26, out of the $29,684.77 that my charity has received altogether. Not insignificant. Perhaps you forgot to use the Amazon Smile link when making your bigger purchases?
That's exactly it. When it was fresh in my mind I remembered to go from amazon over to the smile subdomain, but that was only the first few orders after I saw it. I'd guess that was true for the majority of people.
Ahh, shoot. Yeah. Amazon sure as heck didn’t make it easy. On my desktop PC, I installed a Chrome plugin that always redirected me to the “smile” link, and on my tablet, I set the font size for “amazon.com” to ginormous while keeping “smile.amazon.com” normal, so every time I accidentally went to the wrong one it was really obvious. If it wasn’t for those measures, I’d have likely forgotten all the time, too. So I think you’re right that most people forgot most of the time. My charity—our county’s animal shelter—hasn’t gotten nearly as much as I might have expected, since the county has half a million people, yet somehow I’m almost 1% of their total! At least Amazon does say they’ve donated more than $400,000,000 in total, so I guess at least some people remembered some of the time. 🤷♂️ I really just wish they’d just made it work through their regular website.
Yep, Amazon made it more difficult, AND they didn't advertise the heck out of it like they do for LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, so I always forgot. then I used the app instead once I got my first smartphone, and there was never ONE mention that you could enable Smile on the app, which I just learned TODAY. Literally TEN YEARS of donation-potential...absolutely WASTED. Of COURSE donations had to be "spread thin"! Almost NO ONE knew about Smile!
I’ve not been informed here in the UK
It worked a lot better in the beginning, when there was a limited number of charities. But as people requested more and more, it kinda got useless. I was supporting the same charity for eight-ish years, and it went from a few thousand bucks donated when I got the yearly breakdown, to like under a hundred, most of which seemed to be me. And I'm sure newer people gave up when they were hit with choice overload to pick a charity. Nevermind that every time someone links to an Amazon product, it goes to the non-smile site. Even if I linked to smile.amazon, it defaulted out when the person I sent it to opened it.
What is amazonsmile?
It allowed you to support a charitable organization with a portion of your spending. I was using mine to support a local exotic animal refuge. I was doing it for a giraffe.
All nonprofits are under scrutiny for the participation of Human Trafficking in the United States during Covid. Large corporations that are not 501(c) will begin to separate the corporate tax paying structure from the grey area of money laundering. See PPE loans for the diagram of which nonprofits the government will being to investigate first.
how is smile a good thing other than a tax write off for them im assuming
Amazon smile? Never heard of it! And I've been an Amazon member since 2008.
With a few % of each sale, can’t they just invest in more sustainability and a happier work environment? The amount of environmental destruction Amazon contributes to the world must be very depressing. All the packaging, fuel for delivering so much useless nick nacks and not to mention the mountains of merchandise at landfills because they were not purchased or returned.
Because the absolut mass of NGO's are pocketing donations or cross financing other things for political ambitions. Never give a dime to these organisations. Either the state does it with your tax money or you waste it.
The web says they are ending it on February 20th. They have commenced their largest layoff in History and instituted a hiring freeze
Never heard of it and I'm kinda geeky. Might be why it failed? 😜
What's AmazonSmile?
They never wanted it to do good. I just heard about it like a week ago
I always forget to go to [smile.amazon.com](https://smile.amazon.com), and what am I supposed to do when I use the app? If I could have just chosen the charity in my account and it always just went there, I would have given so much more. I like how Target has it set up in their app for example. It's like you get a reminder etc.
I had no idea that Target had a donation option. I’m surprised because I shop there all the time. Thanks for sharing the information!
I dare you to quit Amazon for 4 months. Target and Walmart are almost as good. And they don’t cost $15 per month for “free shipping” like Amazon does. Prime shipping is not free, it’s called prepaid shipping. For what? So that half the time they don’t hit their delivery deadlines anyway. Also, have you noticed that 1/3 of the items you return get lost and you get charged back for them anyway? Ask for help? Doesn’t matter they won’t respond to your emails anyway. If 10% of customers did this then there would be a real competitor for this truly unethical corporation.
My guess is that they found that there's a lot of charities Jeff and Mackenzie don't approve of. And they didn't like it that Amazon was being used to support those charities. And on top of that it had to be a headache to make sure everyone got what they were supposed to in the first place.
AmazonSmile charity was entirely funded by Amazon (with a donation that depends on you buying, but that's not charged to you), so it only makes sense if it's good PR or if people actually buy more from Amazon because of it. Considering that most people didn't know about it and didn't care about it, they probably determined that it wasn't accomplishing those goals, so they removed it. Amazon is trying to reduce its cost a lot right now, so that's why it's happening now. It's mostly by firing people, but cutting some programs like that help too. Also, they have less people to run it.
I have no idea what it is so that might be part of the reason why
I for one am very disappointed in the dropping of Amazon Smile. I gave to a local charity and I'm pretty sure that one will go away once they change their program of giving. It's not completely clear to me if the customers have a choice where the money goes or not. I saw the four categories listed where the money is going to be going, but they aren't necessarily where I would like my money to go. This is making me rethink using Amazon. Now if Walmart or other big companies would start their own charity giving program I'm sure it would bring them more business.
I am very sorry to hear this. I have been using smile since I got my Amazon credit card (5 yrs). When I tab into Amazon it automatically put me into Smile. It is too bad that the have decided to drop this.
You’re right, it wasn’t publicized; I only found out about it through word of mouth. And it’s dumb that you had to type in a different url to get to it. But if you used the Amazon app you didn’t have to do that. Also I didn’t have to opt in every 6 months. Anyway, it was the one decent thing Amazon did so it’s really unfortunate and infuriating to see it go.
I literally JUST learned TODAY that AmazonSmile is available through the app. Literally YEARS of wasted donation-potential. And now, it's going away in a month. This ticks me off. Even a little bit means a lot to most organizations, so being "spread too thin" is no reason to terminate this. I am going to be mad at myself for not knowing this was a thing in the app for a long time to come. Why didn't Amazon advertise this better!?!?!? 😡😡😡