Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications

My burner google voice number I use for amazon started getting a ton of spam calls after I ordered from a drop shipper. Wonder if that's how they got my number.

And you'll never know if you get the real thing with all the counterfeits they mix in

Amazon has made this information available to Pro Sellers for years.

I think the original logic was if there was a problem with the order (missing part, defective product, etc.) the seller could send a replacement without having to ask Amazon for the customer's contact info.

As an Amazon customer, I have never received marketing mail separately from the item I ordered. However, almost all orders include a printed postcard or slip of paper saying something to the effect of "If there's a problem with the order, contact us, but if you like the product please leave a review."

Amazon changed this because many recent lawsuits have used the fact there's no direct buyer seller relationship to argue Amazon should be liable for defective products instead of the seller.

Their customer service reps also vigorously deny it

> and have a persistent Facebook ad

You're concerned about Amazon giving your personal information to 3rd parties, and yet you use facebook? Sorry, but, lol.

Recently? They've always provided your personal information to third party FBA sellers. At least since 2015 which is when I started FBA. I've always been able to view the name/address my order was shipped to.

I don’t have any personal objections with how Bezos decides to use his money, but to your point of books — how’s your local library? I recently realized I was spending some non-negligible amount of money on books every month and switched to the local library. It obviously depends on where you live but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It’s a fantastic system of local libraries and they’ve all the titles I want to read. There’s a wait for new titles, like Snowden’s book will need me to wait a couple of months, but anything older than a year is almost always available. As the book loan is for 21 days, it also forces me to finish my reading within this time.

Alibris (http://alibris.com) continues to be a wonderful place to buy (mostly used) books. Not affiliated with them, just like 'em a whole lot.

In a galaxy far, far away... the battle rages on between the Imperial Blue Origin and the Rebel SpaceX.

Planets are in chaos as Sith Lord Bezos faces his long adversary Obi Elon Kenobi over the fate of the government of the beings and droids.

alibris.com has a lot of books.

I like to try goodwillbooks.com. You can find some gems there for cheap.

For books, there are still big chains like Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, etc.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

https://www.booksamillion.com/

And speciality ones like Alibris, AbeBooks, etc.

https://www.abebooks.com/

https://www.alibris.com/

Plenty of options besides Amazon.

I get that too from time to time and I feel like it happens if I have a referral cookie set or arrived from a direct referral link and added an item to my cart.

The half a percent they give your charity is less than the referral commission.

Overall I am very happy to be able to passively support my charity of choice this way.

But why is it a separate website in the first place?

Actually, it may well have been a dark pattern. Did you go to Amazon via an affiliate link? I believe that Amazon pays a lesser commission on smile orders than affiliate linked ones.

They don't want to support charities. They want to get people that want that to spend more money with them. They did the math, and the number of people that will say "no" to that permission is significantly smaller than the amount of money they make from forcing that permission in order to get them to give their scraps to charities.

Associating a charitable donation with a transaction is all about exploiting opportunities for price discrimination.

The fundamental problem of selling things was always that you had to set one price, unless it was a big-ticket thing that people haggle over. With one price, it's too high for some people, so you lose the potential profit from selling to them at a lower price, and some people buy, but would pay more, so you lose the extra profit from charging them the maximum it is worth to them.

Being willing to donate during a transaction is a valuable hint that you would pay more if you had to.

I've been avoiding Amazon for a while, but I wanted a product recently that was only on Amazon, and as I clicked through the shipping options, and refused Amazon Prime for the nth time, they jacked up the price by like $5. So I abandoned the order. But I guess their techniques work at scale.

My hope is that somehow, their algorithms to discriminate in pricing cause them to self-destruct eventually. In the meantime, I think this is a major part of the dynamic making people feel, and be, poorer - during the past decade there has just been a revolution in eliminating consumer surplus and converting it into producer surplus, and that's where all the corporate growth/wealth is coming from.

Their mobile website works great. The mobile app is superfluous.

Another workaround - block the notifications at the OS, not inside the app.

That seems to be a violation of Apple’s guidelines for apps.

edit: seems to violate 3.2.2(vi) or 3.2.2(ix) of the App Store Review guidelines

Can't you stop notifications from displaying on specific apps in iphone?

I've been able to do that for a couple years on my sony phone.

I find that airlines tickets in Wallet will update automatically if the gate or boarding times change. Maybe it is related to that?

Also “Smile Always” for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmh...

And Amazon smile! For FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazon-smile/

Theres a story about one of the FAANGs just about every day... and these stories are published by outlets who directly compete with these companies in terms of views, clicks, as views, publishing, etc.

Not defending the tech giants but saying they’re horrible because you read about them everyday is only part of the story. Those stories are laid out in front of you by the very people who have vested interests against Amazons and the Googles of the world.

The articles mostly just repeat the same 3 complaints.

1) They employ a lot of people for doing shitty work. But they're not making those jobs worse, the jobs just suck, and the same jobs elsewhere are just as bad and often pays less. But people don't really want to address the societal root cause, and frown upon talks of increasing minimum wage, setting worker rights regulations, and promoting unionization. So I just see Amazon as a scapegoat for the fact no one really cares.

2) They struggle with quality control, which I've never particularly experienced. And I feel this is true of all big platforms in the internet era. Also, it's normal at their scale, even if only 1% of products have quality issues, that's like millions of orders to write news about. Maybe my local store also has about 1% of issues, but it just doesn't make headlines. The flip side is Amazon has awesome support and return policies.

3) They're killing local stores. I guess I just see that as healthy competition. Amazon just offers a really convenient service. I don't have to leave my house to buy stuff! That's awesome. Also, I see it more as internet shopping is killing local stores. If Amazon goes bust, it'll be some other online store. Driving your car to buy goods just no longer makes sense with the internet in my opinion, unless its goods you have to try out or inspect first. Lastly, I find the real local outlets, like straight from farms markets, hand made artisan shops etc. are competing quite well and not dying. Etsy is doing great for example. So it's more the non competitive middleman that are dying, and that's just healthy competition in my mind. They have to offer a better middleman service, or wait for Amazon to get lazy and stop offering a good service, which they haven't yet.

You should feel fortunate that you don't understand why, because the answer will frustrate you even more than not understanding it. The horrible truth: most people don't give a damn.

If one considers absence of desire to take a certain approach as a constraint, anything can be a legit constraint.

I think we all know the answer to that.