Amazon Smile

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Amazon Smile

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jul 20, 2016 9:51 am

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?
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Re: Amazon Smile

Postby DashaBlade » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:17 am

I don't use it, but apparently, any donation Amazon makes compared to your purchase amount is going to be tiny. I googled it, and aside from the site itself and the Facebook page for it and the twitter and all that jazz, the first thing to come up was an article at Huffington Post.

But it’s those positive feelings that programs like AmazonSmile are now tapping into as people can buy products, feel good about giving to charity and move on with their lives when in reality only 0.5 percent of their purchase is being given to their cause. So if you wanted to give $50 to a charity you’d have to spend $10,000 through AmazonSmile. $10,000 to Amazon. $50 to charity. It’s pretty clear who wins here and I’ll give you a hint: It’s not the charity.


In short, I say skip it and donate directly to charity if you want to do something worthwhile. 5 cents for every ten dollars spent isn't a big donation by any stretch of the imagination, and I personally don't spend enough at Amazon to ever make it worth any charity's while. I mean, maybe I spend a hundred bucks a year there, and that's what? One pack of gum or one can of generic corn worth of money to the charity I'd probably donate at least five bucks to if they were going around the local mall with a collecting tin? Yeah, the extra spam isn't worth the fifty cents worth of good karma to me.
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Re: Amazon Smile

Postby Grimstone » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:32 am

If I'm understanding this right, when you use Amazon smile they donate some percentage to a charity but when you use the regular site they do not. By not incorporating this donation feature into their main site they're effectively reducing the amount of traffic that makes purchases through Amazon smile, which reduces the number of sales they have to donate x% on.

Edit: Perhaps they benefit from being seen as a charitable entity as DashaBlade's post suggests, but what they don't benefit from is being needlessly charitable so they make this smile site knowing that a good percentage of customers won't go out of their way to donate through it. Now they can say they will donate 0.5% of sales or whatever when in reality they know it will be significantly less than that, therefore making it seem like they're more charitable than they actually are.
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Re: Amazon Smile

Postby 52xMax » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:12 am

The way amazon normally works is through referral "associates", who place links on their websites and then ask their visitors to support them by clicking on them and making regular purchases on amazon. For every time they make a sale, these associates get a little kickback from amazon, which in turn motivates them to ask more and more people to use their links. It's basically free advertising and guilt tripping climbing on the back of user's sympathy for their favorite content creators.

Amazon smile works in a similar way, except users get to pick a charity which makes them feel better about themselves, and amazon gets to deduct the donations from their taxes. I'm also assuming the kickback is much lower than regular associates because I refuse to believe so many places whore themselves and their audiences out for half a penny on the dollar. So the reason smile is a different domain might be related to the way they calculate how much of every purchase goes to non-profit and for profit associates, but who knows?

I've been using smile for years, but I don't spend that much either, so my contributions to charity water have been minimal at best. So I also try to donate a couple of dollars a couple times a year to actually justify the sense of superiority I get every time I get kindle books on a whim, because what little that might be it's still something which might make a difference. My girlfriend also turned me on to doctors without borders, another awesome organization that does great work. I donate every three or four months, which is the frequency I used to donate blood back when I was able to do that sort of thing. You can also support them via amazon smile, which doesn't hurt and cost you anything, but I agree that direct donations are probably more effective.

In the same way, if you enjoy the work of your favorite content creators, you should also consider supporting them by purchasing their art and/or merchandise, going to their live shows, donating to their patreon, etc.
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