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Comment by lalos | Hacker News Reader

I have Signal as my smile.amazon.com recipient. It's not a lot but it averages to a reasonable monthly membership app cost. Note: your purchases have to be done through the smile.amazon subdomain to be eligible (for mobile apps: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011)

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Data on how much this can generate in aggregate; I chose EFF for my 2020 donations and Amazon Smile sent a year-end report on 15 Dec.

    $45,901.14 was donated to EFF in 2020
    $655,382.45 donated to EFF in total
    $217,644,976.48 to all US charities
    $237,615,915.89 to all global charities

Amounts in USD.

I never thought smile was actually this effective, but I assume based off of these numbers you are doing the vast majority of all your shopping on amazon (groceries in addition to household purchases)?

This is for all people who give to EFF.

I assume those numbers are aggregated across everyone who has chosen EFF as their Smile donation recipient.

Somehow, thinking about how much money Besos earns (is it 78 billions this year? [1]), I find smile's slogan "Experience feel-good shopping" a bad joke at best.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/what-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos...

Did you have to bring politics into it? Smile is better than nothing, people are going to shop with or without it on Amazon why not send a fraction to "charities" ?

I've been using smile.amazon.com since August 2019, and to date I've generated $6.01. I guess I don't use Amazon as much as you. It's like, shit, for the amount of trouble I've gone through to make sure I'm on smile.amazon.com instead of www.amazon.com, I should have just given some money to my recipient.

There is some browser plug-in to redirect you there if that helps.

I don’t know how smile works on the mobile app. Perhaps it doesn’t.

It does: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=15576745011

Indeed, I configured a Redirector[1] rule to do it:

    Redirect:     https?://www\.amazon\.com/(.*)
    Pattern type: Regular Expression
    to:           https://smile.amazon.com/$1
    Applies to:   Main window (address bar)

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

Smile is available on the iOS Amazon mobile app, but only if you allow Amazon to send you promotional notifications.

But then you need a browser extension just for that? It’s a bit overkill. I wonder if this works well with /etc/hosts or local DNS.

So? The amount of additional memory, disk, and processing it takes up are basically nothing in the greater scheme of things.

How strange. I just checked my Smile account and I've generated £6.01 for my charity (my childrens' school). What are the odds...

From my perspective, the odds are fairly high that in a large group of people, two of them happen to have the same Smile account balance.

Sure, but in this case it was a case of me not knowing one could check their Smile balance. GP posted their balance, prompting me to check mine, and the total was the same. That feels more akin to me going into a room and the first person I talk to having the same birthday as me than just finding 2 people in a room who happen to have the same birthday.

The situation is probably closer to this: Lots of people went into a room and asked someone what their birthday is. Only you happened to have the same one, so no one else said anything.

But, congrats on using up your luck for the next month or so. :)

If I posted “Think of a number. 1-100. Got it.........

You’re thinking of 17!” some of the hundreds of readers would be amazed by my accurate prediction

That's the classical birthday "paradox" but that's not what happened here.

Here, a random person in the room announced their birthday, and the question is whether someone else in the room shares that birthday. It's a very different situation, where I'm guessing you need around a thousand people for it to be very likely that their birthdays coincide, compared to the twenty or so for the birthday paradox.

I just set z as my search prefix in firefox, send via sync to all devices.

there are tons of redirectors to smile.amazon.com in the chrome and firefox stores

Never heard of amazon smile before, but there registry of charities to donate to is really hard to ensure you got the right one.

I set mine to "Signal Technology Foundation" which I am fairly sure is correct, but there is no link, no description or other method to verify; it doesn't spark a lot of confidence.

And if that wasn't confusing enough, Signal et al call the foundation "The Signal Foundation" while the proper, official name is "Signal Technology Foundation".

Amazon notes[0] that they "will donate 0.5% of the purchase price from your eligible AmazonSmile purchases". Looking at my purchase history over the last six years, that number is closer to 0.25% (presumably because many purchases weren't considered eligible).

I still keep my purchases going to my charity of choice, but make no mistake: opting for AmazonSmile contributions won't move the needle on your charity. You have to make contributions directly out of your own wallet. Bonus points if your employer will match them.

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_aas_s...

> opting for AmazonSmile contributions won't move the needle on your charity

It's better than the opposite, which is nothing.

Wouldn't the opposite be giving to those organizations directly? I'm not opposed to Smile, but presumably it isn't intended to be the only source of funding. Still, like you say, it's better than not giving anything.

The opposite of using Amazon Smile is not using it. It costs you nothing and benefits charities.

Sure, it's better than nothing, but I worry that there will be people who think that their use of Smile is enough and might deter some active giving.

I've funneled tens of thousands of dollars through Amazon in six years that resulted in only about $65 of donations, so less than $1/mo.

But I also give $100/mo (x2 with my employer match) to the same charity. So Smile donations will barely register compared with active, intentional giving.

"All worldwide charities have received £180,650,306.59 as of November 2020" [0]

That might move a needle...

[0] https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/chpf/dashboard?ref_=nav_cs_smi...

TIL: smile.amazon.com and just added Signal Technology Foundation. Thanks!

Note: Signal Foundation is officially "Signal Technology Foundation", so this appears to be the correct recipient in the list on Amazon. Hopefully someone can verify this.

That's the one.

I’ve always wondered, is there some legitimate reason Amazon doesn’t just apply the non-profit donation functionality to Amazon proper? If not I’m sure we can safely assume “because money”

I always thought smile was some trick to break referral links and avoid paying out. I'm not clear on how it all works, I could be completely wrong.

Because of threads exactly like this one!

The mobile app requires you to enable notifications to turn on smile donations on in-app purchases. Talk about a dark pattern.

That’s the whole point though? They’re paying for you to enable notifications, and you can decide if the price is fare

You can additionally use an extension to force your browser to always use the smile.amazon subdomain.

Smile is nice, I wish they offered it in Canada.

Smile seems US-only

UK too.

We got it here in Germany too.

Germany as well, so no.

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