A couple months ago, I started getting popups asking me to choose a charity for Amazon Smile. So eventually, when I was going to buy some stuff on Amazon, I did. Then Amazon tells me that to apply purchases to the chosen charity, I have to shop through smile.amazon.com. So clearly they have this other site they're promoting. If they're not somehow increasing their profit through the use of this sub-domain I'm not sure what the point of having it is (rather than just saying "we'll donate a small amount to charity if you pick the charity).
I think I've seen a couple of ads, so I think it might be ad-supported, but I haven't seen enough that it's clearly ad-supported. I have started getting spammy emails from Amazon more frequently, so maybe the condition of donating a small part of my purchase price to a chosen charity is that they get to send me emails telling me I should buy the stuff I looked at? I just get mildly annoyed like with all the spam I get from people I foolishly gave my email and don't even open the emails.
Maybe they hope that by tracking what people participating in Amazon Smile look at and buy and what charity they support, they can fine-tune their recommendation algorithms? But them why do they need a distinct subdomain, and why do they have featured charities? (I nearly picked the Wildlife Conservancy because it was featured, then decided I'd rather pick a more targeted conservation group, then couldn't decide and just picked the Electronic Frontier Foundation instead.)
Does anyone else use Amazon Smile? Does anyone know what the point of the distinct subdomain is?