Article is paywalled, so I didn't read. But... I signed up for Smile a few years back but, since it required shopping via smile.amazon.co.uk rather than plain

Article is paywalled, so I didn't read. But... I signed up for Smile a few years back but, since it required shopping via smile.amazon.co.uk rather than plain old amazon.co.uk, I hardly ever remembered to use it. There was too much muscle memory already invested in typing "ama..." into my browser address bar and following the autocomplete. Amazon could have made it a lot more frictionless by having Smile donation as something you could set up in your site preferences, which was then automatically applied to every purchase. Or could have had it as an option to tick at checkout. But, I imagine that, from their point of view it was better to have the added complication of shopping via a separate subdomain in place, as it minimised the number of people who would actually remember to use it, thus minimising Amazon's charitable payouts, whilst still making them look good, for having such a facility in place. Bit at least Smile didn't cost the customer anything. eBay have an even more cynical approach. At checkout, they ask you do you want to add an extra £1 charitable donation to your purchase which, no doubt, they take the credit for. Given the eye-watering fees they charge, maybe they could dip into their own pockets for their charitable munificence, rather than try to shake down their users.