Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your purchases to the charity of your choice

This is fantastic!

To save the most lives, select Against Malaria Foundation as your charity. It's the current top recommendation from Givewell (http://www.givewell.org), an excellent charity evaluation organization. They focus on proven cost-effectiveness and transparency.

AMF can save lives at a rate of $2500 or so per life saved, which vastly outperforms most other giving opportunities, at least if you require a high standard of evidence. Givewell's evaluation of AMF is here: http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF

The first thing I thought when I saw this was awesome!

The second thing I thought was that I'd never remember to use it.

Just whipped up a tiny little chrome extension that will always redirect you to smile.amazon.com when you go to Amazon. It's not well tested, so could screw you up a bunch, but figured I'd share.

https://github.com/jessepollak/smile

Errr, out of 1 million eligible 501c's how many are "controversial"? as in political shills or fronts for religious nut jobs?

I wonder how Amazon plans to deal with the inevitable "why did you donate to a charity supporting / opposing $ISSUE?

Edit: well kids that's what happens if you comment before coffee - a negative take on something that has a decent potential to up the level of giving USA wide by a huge margin. Visit givewell.org and choose your favourite.

may as well make that prime account count - let me know when the UK can join in too.

FWIW, I work helping the non-profit site www.thegivingmachine.co.uk. We give 2.25% of purchases tracked through our site from Amazon (plus some other retailers).

We also have a lot of other merchants signed up.

Previous Discussion (4 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643676

Amazon may be making more profit on these purchases, rather than less--utilizing the potent marketing skills of non-profit organizations to direct more dollars to Amazon without Amazon having to pay higher affiliate fees. I'm not an expert, but I think Amazon's affiliate fees can be as high as 10% of the purchase price. 0.5% is a 20x cheaper customer acquisition cost.

There's a catch... It only works if you go to http://smile.amazon.com, using the regular amazon won't do anything.

I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to incorporate one's own charity these days.

A 0.5% effective rebate on everything you purchase on Amazon is better than many bank accounts offer...

Is this forever? Why are we just hearing about this now - and from a mallard?

yup that's also the amount of taxes amazon's paying in europe

This is great news! Keep it up!