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Comment by devicetray0 | Hacker News Reader

That must just be for purchases through the app? Yesterday, I went to amazon.com and the website reminded me that I wasn't using the Smile (charity) portal and had a button to redirect me to smile.amazon.com. I smiled at that non-dark-pattern. I don't have the app...

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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.

And it’s probably tax deductible

Aren't all business expenses tax deductible?

I’d say the deduction would be claimed by Amazon, and the IRS wouldn’t allow the customer to claim it. And as a sibling commenter mentioned, for businesses it doesn’t matter if it’s a charitable donation or business expense.

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

I’ve never, ever understood this

It's not even like they want to offer the option but hope people won't use it. (I think.) After all, they remind you pretty frequently to use it if you've chosen someone to donate to.

Yeah, only thing I can think of is they need users to manually opt in to making those donations, and forcing users to remember and use an odd URL is their chosen way of doing that. It's weird, but for a good cause, so whatever I suppose.

The user doesn't get the feeling of having done a good thing if they don't actively choose to use Smile instead of shopping on Amazon as usual.

Amazon doesn’t like when customers use Google to search for a product, then click on the Amazon link and buy it. Amazon doesn’t get the search and behavioral data from that. By forcing the customer to go to a special site, the customer has to now search and browse directly on Amazon for their items.

Answer: more user data

Amazon should fix their search engine, but Jeff Bezos has been tone-deaf to the issue for years. I think it was 6 or so years back when I was at an all-hands that Bezos was confronted by an employee about the poor quality of search on amazon.com and Bezos shrugged the matter off, said that Top Minds™ had created it and that he thought they did a great job.

Both Facebook and Amazon have terrible search engines.

That explanation doesn't add up because you can add "smile." in front of any Amazon url and still get the donation.

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.

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