I don't really have the authority to make donations out of other peoples cut of the money very often. Kind of missing the whole point of Amazon smile. I could spend 5$ on a toothbrush at Walmart, or I could spend 5$ on a toothbrush at Amazon and 25¢ goes to a charity I like. It doesn't need to be tax deductible because I did not spend any money on it,and actually donating to that charity directly would mean I'm out 5.25$ instead of 5$
Because it is not your donation - it is Amazon's donation out of their profit from products you purchased. You just got to (allegedly) specify where they donated it.
It's not a donation unless... it's donated. With Amazon, you paid money and got a thing. That's not a donation. Paying money and getting nothing... thats a donation. That's what can be deducted.
You purchased goods from Amazon - and they promised to send some portion of their profit to some organization of your choosing.
It's firmly Amazon's money at that point. You bought something from them... their choice on how to spend it. They were generous enough to have this program at all, really.
I would recommend finding a decent charity organization that speaks to you and what is important to you - and donate directly. Use services like Charity Navigator (or similar) to find reputable ones that maximize your impact.
I already do that. It was nice to see a portion of money that I'd be spending on other things also going to charity. Now I've got less reason to give that money to Amazon instead of another retailer.
They could increase the impact by giving a larger percent of the sale. Amazon sends an email every so often telling you how much you've "donated" via Smile, and I'm always surprised how sadly small that number is. I've been in the program for many years and I buy a lot of shit from them.
Because no PR opportunity for Amazon. But I agree, it's a feeble dishonest excuse. Better to simply say "Because we're cutting costs", instead of weeping how it failed to set the world on fire with glowing PR for their munificence.
Personally I try hard to avoid sending my business to Amazon whenever there's an alternative, and this was one of the good things about them.
The real reason is "our profit margins are currently spread too thin" but they can't say that because it'd make Amazon look really bad in terms of PR. Amazon is currently looking to cut stuff that costs Amazon money and something that reduces their tax liability is also bad for PR if it means that Amazon pays little or no taxes.
You can select which charity to support on smile.amazon.de at least. So pick the top 10% or 5% or whatever charities that were supported by the most customers.
Funny thing is I’d bet the small amount trickling in to the long tail charities is more impactful to them than a larger amount to the big mega-charities.
I run one of those long tails and Amazon Smile was just right to cover running costs for hosting, bank fees, etc.
Honestly I'm surprised they're doing this; something must have bit them on the paperwork side, because $100-$200 for each tiny charity (think local dog shelter, local church, etc; even if they're 'branded' they're often independent charities) was a cheap advertisement for Amazon. Now that's over.
One of the best reasons to use Amazon Smile was to reduce and launder affiliate links and ad spam. I can't help but wonder if the real reason they are doing this is because of affiliates and/or advertisers.
(As someone paranoid of targeted advertising, but who doesn't mind normal advertising, the death of Amazon Smile was the final push I needed to move all my Amazon tabs into their own Firefox Container.)
Amazon started its history with a deep affiliate system whereby "anyone" (capable of creating an affiliate account) could create affiliate marked links to get a small profit share on items sold, plus marketing reports and other information (which only grew more detailed over time). Because of that, affiliate links are everywhere on the web. Advertising companies themselves also use them both to get an extra cut on the advertised item and also to get those juicy marketing reports for ad spam.
Originally affiliate marks in URLs were easy to spot, they were just query parameters (after the ?) and removing all query parameters removed affiliate info from Amazon links. (There are still ancient ones out there like that.) After a while, and I don't know when the transition date was, these started to get embeded sometimes "steganographically" in other parts of the URL.
At one point, as a blogger with bloated ideas of my own influence I set up an affiliate account for myself. For a few years after that, I liked to use Amazon in "Affiliate mode" where it had an extra toolbar at the top that would let me at least take any link I was looking at and replace any affiliate marks with my own. I could use that to stop sending marketing info to links that I had followed (and sometimes make a couple pennies back on purchases, like one of the world's dumbest credit card rewards systems).
The way Amazon Smile operated is that it basically earmarked the money that would have gone to an affiliate for the charity of your choice. (I wouldn't be surprised if Smile had just been implemented as a pseudo-affiliate, which also adds to other conspiracy thinking that Smile might not have been that hard to maintain from an implementation standpoint.) Because the charity was set in your user preferences there's no use for affiliate marks in URLs, so none of the smile.amazon.com URLs have affiliate marks at all because they don't need them.
So the easiest way to take any www.amazon.com URL you could find in the wild and make sure it didn't have any affiliate marks and wouldn't send data or cash back to an affiliate was to simply replace www with smile and let Amazon's own backend refresh the URL without affiliate marks. This was useful for cleaning your own browsing histories of marketing data and also for making sure that if you were forwarding links on to friends and loved ones they also weren't accidentally sending tracking data back to some affiliate with no real need to know.
Because it came under the field of vision of some dumbass MBA who decided that saving a few millions would be worth more and a sizeable contribution to their end of year bonus figure.
Unpopular opinion, but charities are like carbon credits. Most of the money goes into people’s pockets and very less percentage of the donations actually make it towards helping the cause they run on. Very few legitimately use the money in the way we expect it to be used. So I’m okay with them losing $400M.
I’m a volunteer at a branch of Samaritans[1] in the UK that runs on something like £70-85k/year, running a listening service with 60-80 volunteers including infrastructure, who spend thousands of hours a year on the phone with the suicidal, the distressed, and sometimes just those who desperately need someone to talk to.
It’s a service that fulfils a critical need but is run on a shoestring budget, with very little of the money spent on anything but critical necessities. Although Amazon Smile wasn’t a huge source of income for my branch, it will leave a hole that will have to be filled.
I can’t say I disagree that there aren’t plenty of mega-charities that spent too much on admin and fundraising, but I also know firsthand there are plenty out there deserving of every penny coming their way.
I upvoted your unpopular opinion but it doesn't have to be that way.
You can be involved in the community and get to know local organizations and how they run, then give to them with more certainty.
In our case, the bulk of our charitable donations goes to organizations we know first hand, which are mainly local. Eg: helping the local preschool, our houses of worship, etc. The most 'remote' org we give to is the Israeli ambulance corps, but we still "know" them in the sense that my wife had been a volunteer EMT there a long time ago.
Point being that - there's some positive synergy between your physical community involvement and your "insight" into how organizations in your community function, and a sense of how the money is spent.
The fact that one of these orgs got something like $400 via Amazon Smile from us last year is nice although let's be real - nobody is going to stop using Amazon because of this change.
Right but those numbers are wrong too. 70-99% gets spent on the cause but I’ll tell you how.
If you’re a charity that say collects for homeless people, even if the charity says they spend 90% on the cause, the actual benefits to the homeless people is actually close to maybe 30-50%. They creatively spend money “for the cause” like printing pamphlets or spending on a fundraising event or hiring a “consultant” to strategize on how to fix homelessness or plenty of others.
I knew before posting that my comment was going to be downvoted. But it was made from a place of hurt after being involved in multiple charities big and small. There are genuine grassroots community based charities that work well. But they are few. Most well run charities spend at best 60% of the money wisely.
> They creatively spend money “for the cause” like printing pamphlets or spending on a fundraising event or hiring a “consultant” to strategize on how to fix homelessness or plenty of others.
Printing and distributing pamphlets that educate those with means of influence to make things better does support the cause. Fundraising expenses are overhead and reported as such. Hiring a consultant to help an organization carry out its mission also supports the cause. Just because the organization isn't giving 100% of its receipts into the hands of the homeless directly doesn't mean they aren't helping the homeless.
That said, there are probably plenty of organizations with suspicious claims. Take charity: water's 100% claim. They like to use it to appear like they have no overhead, but it's just wordsmithing. It's also a rather egregious example of how being to focused on eliminating overhead can be harmful.
Exactly. Nobody is getting filthy rich off bobs dog shelter but people certainly do milk the big charities. Often the tiny ones that benefited from Smile were run by volunteers and all funds raised were used for non-salary expenses.
If that's the supposed reason, I call bullshit. Could've just reduced the number of charities.