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Comment by nicklevin | Hacker News Reader

There were seemingly odd hoops for customers to jump through to have their purchases qualify for Smile. Didn't type in the 'smile' URL? Too bad, no donation for you. One of the oddest was requiring push notifications in order for mobile purchases to count (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233815).

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I've personally used chrome extension "Smile Always". It automatically converts all amazon links to amazon smile links.

This is sad. I am currently at $417.30 in donations to my local charity. Amazon is in denial if they think this hasnt had an impact.

I don’t so much think it doesn’t have an impact, as much nothing on the list has any PR pizzazz.

$316.62 to a grade school? Lame.

$100,000 novelty check to a board member’s favorite charity that happens to be run by his son? Now that’s pizzazz with a capital P!

That just means bad marketing.

> Amazon has helped fund over 20 thousand charities of your choosing. These small charities couldn't have made it without your help.

easier to get promoted by replacing a program with a new one you made

Amazon in my country has an image problem. Sure people use it, but people hate it for "killing the high street" and other such nonsense.

Facebook adverts picking random local charities and showing how much they've raised is far better, run them on amazon's front page too.

The local hospice I choose has raised £3k via amazon smile. That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.

>That's far better PR than them giving £1m novelty cheques to some remote city based charity.

How is it better PR if hardly anybody knows about it?

Amazon runs a news story in local paper about how smile is benefitting $list_of_local_charities

The email they sent to me was they are going to take the money from my local charity and instead give it to ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Of course it had an impact. It's guaranteed to just be something that's not seen as 'sexy' internally, and therefore has probably had no-one championing it, and it gathered dust and finally... someone just wanted to kill the code.

I've seen it happen first hand in similar sized companies.

I'm quite convinced the motivations for both the creation and teardown of this donation program must have come from the money people, not from the techies. It must have been a tax write-off. Nothing else makes sense, knowing how strongly Amazon is a cost-cutting company.

I would often forget to type "smile" when searching for stuff, but then I'd just add to cart, close the window, and go to my cart via smile. That seemed to work.

But I think we can all see this for what it is — belt tightening. Will they increase other philanthropic activities to the tune of what they were previously giving away via Smile? I would be very, very surprised if so.

They actually might. Whatever the overhead was in managing and tracking payments to that many charities based on payments from that many customers had to be significant. Instead, they could just throw 50 mil across the top 10 each year and not have to deal with managing the smile program anymore.

big corporate donations require 0 engineers, that’s a huge savings

I imagine there could be ways to make their philanthropic donations more efficient. What I'm saying is I doubt they are actually going to donate this amount, and achieve greater impact (however that is measured). I imagine they are going to launch programs that they were already going to launch, donating to whatever charities they favor for other reasons. For example, if they're building a new office somewhere, they can give a bunch of money to charities in that community, to build goodwill in the community.

But these donations are not done purely for altruistic reasons — they're calculated decisions that also help the corporate entity. There's nothing wrong with this, and they'd still be doing good. But it's not the same as letting your customers decide where to donate hundreds of millions of dollars.

> belt tightening

I suspect this is the time when the charities need smile donations the most.

Charity starts at home.

Specifically Bezos' bottom line.

Wrong belt.

I always assumed having to type the smile domain was more about making sure they didn't have to make both an affiliate payment and a smile payment on the same order.

Seemed like an easy way to cut off affiliates while appearing to be generous. Maybe I'm just too cynical.

This is exactly what I always assumed. Forcing you to navigate to a different URL killed any affiliate cookies.

Oh but they weren't forcing the customers to go to smile and strip the affiliate attribution for their session. Why, they don't even provide a link for the customer to click! The customer is choosing to actively navigate to smile themselves (when prompted by t he reminder at the top of the amazon page). So obviously that means Amazon can't be accused of doing anything nefarious to screw their affiliates (or, more seriously and litigiously, their advertising partners) out of their due credit for the sale. The customer simply chose to switch to smile. And it's all for charity so who could possibly complain?

www.amazon.com sets cookies for (*).amazon.com, though. Session cookies (and affiliate info) could therefore still be accessed on smile.amazon.com. I think affiliate attribution is just discarded regardless of cookie presence.

Exactly. It was also a way to train customers to navigate directly to Amazon instead of through search engines (where Amazon pays for ads).

They wanted you to turn on push on mobile so they could pollute your Lock Screen with ads. I did it and promptly set iOS to deliver them silently because it got really annoying, but it was an easy way for the EFF to get some money from purchases I was making anyway.

Yep, i was pretty pissed when they started that

I'm honestly surprised smile went on for as long as it did. It always seemed so out of character for Amazon.

It was also in this weird spot where they wanted to use it for PR but simultaneously wanted to shove it beneath the floorboards so people won’t mass adopt it.

On android they did the asshole thing and detected if the notifications were disabled and turned off smile. No ios hiding the true notification state there.

This is the main reason why I think that they never took this serious and never actually wanted many people to use it.

A switch in your profile which would default you to smile shouldn't have been such a big problem for a company like Amazon.

That’s because smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link; incentivize people to retype the link before actually buying it was the ultimate goal.

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