Amazon Announces $100M Donated to Charities Through AmazonSmile | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Announces $100M Donated to Charities Through AmazonSmile

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43 pointstareqak39 comments

This is great and everything, I'll never criticize anyone giving to charity for PR gains.

I'm wondering how something like Amazon Smile affects customer behavior. Amazon makes you really think about using Amazon Smile (doesn't just donate a portion of all sales to charity, no way to automatically make all direct amazon.com purchases automatically do this). You need to remember or use some tool to make everything through smile.amazon.com.

Is consumer spending affected by this? How much better do users feel about themselves after purchasing on smile.amazon.com vs amazon.com? Are they less likely to return an item? Leave a more positive review?

Obviously any money going to charity is great in the first place, and using smile.amazon.com to give that 0.5% is worth it. Just curious.

Personally, I know it’s a factor in my not using their mobile app. I’ve also talked to somebody who uses the app to shop, but then went to web to checkout with Smile.

On the other hand, I really don’t know how much Amazon cares if I use their mobile app. They don’t get pushy about it.

I use amazon smile and am happy it exists, but I’d challenge Amazon to do even more. Walmart does $300M a year in giving; Target, Microsoft, and Google do around $150M each.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/fortune-500-most-charitable-co...

This feels really small. That’s probably minutes worth of revenue flowing through them. I’m glad it’s 100MM and not 0 (kudos to amazon for doing this at all), but it doesn’t seem like a huge milestone given how long the program has lasted. I would have expected it to hit 1B by now.

I seriously doubt $100 million is minutes worth of revenue, even for Amazon.

Fair point, doing some quick math it takes them 5 hours.

You're probably thinking if gross revenue. Looking at net revenue however, it comes out to about two weeks... Okay, still a very short period of time.

When you use the word revenue by itself, it almost always means "gross revenue".

And technically, net revenue is not the same as profit or net income. Net revenue would be gross revenue minus discounts and a few other things.

It seems like the figure you are using is probably net income.

FWIW, I meant gross revenue... minutes was just a flippant guess.

There are extensions for all major browsers which will automatically redirect amazon links to the smile version.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-smile/

I don't understand why this is an extension and not just built-in functionality to their website, though.. it feels like a potentially crooked way to get me to install an extension.

Yes, they want you to install an add-on Amazon didn't make. You don't have to install it, just go to smile.amazon.com when you shop. They even do reminders every once in a while to help you remember. Or change your hosts file to redirection www.amazon.com requests to smile.amazon.com.

Or raise your hands and claim it's all a conspiracy I guess.

I understand that the GP's add-on is not Amazon's. But Amazon wants you to install their "Amazon Assistant" extension in order to get this functionality[1]. They are obviously using their Smile program to push this, otherwise they would just bake this functionality directly into their website.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/dashboard/ref=smi_se_rspo_l...

Oh please. It's a link at the very bottom of the page. Amazon is forcing customers to be proactive to make sure their purchases qualify as donations. It can't be "baked into the website" as purchases from Smile don't payout for affiliate links. We do, however, remind you every once in a while once you start using the regular website.

It wouldn't matter what they did there would be hard core naysayers finding issues with it.

Sometimes I'm happy to have the link that sent me get the referral. When I want to go direct, I just hit splat-L, type sm, and up pops smile.amazon.com.

Am I missing something? Does this mean $100M in donations since the beginning of Smile? That sounds astronomically low.

Apologies for beating this drum but I find it important.

Verify with the charitable organization that they registered to receive funds from Amazon!

Amazon's list of charities comes from GuideStar USA which compiled the information from the IRS, and includes organizations which may not have registered with Amazon and thus may never receive the donations. See the section "Charitable Organizations that Do Not Register" here: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/pd/ref=smi_se_saas_lpd_spd

Last I checked, there is no clear indication to consumers that a listed charity has actually registered.

The best way to verify this on your own appears to be to pretend you want to register that organization on Amazon's Org Central site[0] which will show if it's already registered. (An example search for Child's Play[1].)

As a shopper Amazon does not make this abundantly clear when you're selecting an organization. One thing to look for is the amount of information shown about the organization, specifically the incorporation year, as those that register have to fill out a profile.

According to the FAQ if a shopper selects an organization that is not registered and makes an eligible purchase they will track the donation. If the organization registers they'll get the donation, but if they have not after 2 years then Amazon will contact the shopper and give them 30 days to select a new charity. (I'm not sure if this then resets the 2 year clock or not.) If the shopper does not select a new organization then Amazon reallocates the donation across the registered organizations.

In any case the only way to be 100% sure is to inquire with the organization.

[0]: https://org.amazon.com/

[1]: https://org.amazon.com/npo/search?q=Child%27s%20Play&p=1

Wow, that is fantastic! It's amazing what small amounts can do at scale. I already shop through AmazonSmile and this motivates me to continue doing so.

Congrats to Amazon, its shoppers, and the employees who pushed for and built this feature.

Are there any cons at all to purchasing through smile vs regular Amazon?

Nope, the prices are the same on both sites.

Not for you, but if you click on any affiliate links, I believe they’re reset on Amazon smile so the site/whatever won’t get their slice.

Awesome. I buy everything in a cleared cookie browser so nobody was getting a dime of affiliate money from me anyway. Definitely going to set this up as my default.

The only con I've been able to find is a) it only works if you remember to start shopping at smile.amazon.com, and b) the sign up process funnels customers to picking the larger and already well-known non-profits -- it is possible to pick any registered 501c3, but find and setting the smaller non-profit is fiddly and requires special knowledge (tax ID number) to complete.

Does it? I’ve managed to search by name for them.

If the name is unique, name search is easy.

When a TIN comes in handy is if there are two non-profits with similar names.

Not really a con, but I don't believe you can use Smile with the mobile apps. Unfortunately, as more of my purchases have shifted to mobile for convenience, this means less for Smile.

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