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Comment by Nightshaxx | Hacker News Reader

So my parents run a non-profit and a recently letter we got from Amazon Smile explains what is happening here. Amazon Smile is a service were you can choose a charity for Amazon to donate to. When you shop at Amazon, a small percentage of that money goes to the selected charity.

Recently they got a letter in the mail explaining they had been chosen as recipients of this Amazon Smile money. The thing is, they never chose to be featured on Amazon Smile. Amazon used some database of non-profits (that they had never heard of) in order to present options to customers, then notified the non-profits later. The letter specifically said that in order to collect the money, they needed to create an account with Amazon smile.

PayPal is probably just pre-populating their list of charities, failing to fully notify recipients of the donations, then saying "Whoops, I guess we got to do something with the money."

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Dammit. I've been using Amazon Smile to donate to a small non-profit. It's obscure enough that I was surprised to find it listed as an option, but given that it was there, I just assumed that they would get the money set aside for them.

Is Amazon doing the same thing (withholding donations from charities that don't register for their service)? Is there any way to check?

"If you do not register your charitable organization, including providing accurate bank account information for an electronic transfer, the AmazonSmile Foundation will still track and store donations earned in each calendar quarter. Once you’ve registered your charitable organization, your organization will be eligible to receive in the next donation cycle all donation amounts that were previously allocated to your organization and were not subject to reallocation under the Participation Agreement."

but

"Please note that donations that have been allocated to an unregistered charitable organization from customers that made their first supporting purchase more than eight full quarters ago and have not been distributed will be reallocated to other registered charitable organizations."

Sounds like exactly the same situation as PayPal, and there's no way for me as a customer to check who's actually getting the donation, right?

Which non-profit?

I'd love to hear more about how Amazon Smile works from the charitable organization's side.

They just instruct some classes for engaged couples. Nothing that interesting.

https://org.amazon.com will probably be of interest to you.

That probably explains why the amazon smile program included a local charity that caught me by surprise. I didn't think the local office would be technically savvy to sign up for a special amazon program.

Wow. That just sounds arrogant on the parts of Amazon and PayPal.

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