7 ms·

> "our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin" If that's the supposed reason, I call bullshit. Could've just reduced the number of charities.

spookthesunset 4y ago
Which charities should be remain?
- perlgeek 4y ago
  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.
  - gharman 4y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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.
      - fakedang 4y ago
        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. Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee.
        arbitrage 4y ago
        > Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee. Is the money that good?
        midasuni 4y ago
        Only if you cause untold misery to millions of charities
        fakedang 4y ago
        I don't know. Just received the offer last month.
        vineyardmike 4y ago
        > Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee. Ya sure this is what you learn in school? > a sizeable contribution to their end of year bonus figure Highly doubt they’re getting bonuses at Amazon.
        fakedang 4y ago
        I don't know, just received the offer last month. Bonus or not, some line item adjustments do put you in line for promotions.
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        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.)
        smcin 4y ago
        > reduce and launder affiliate links and ad spam Can you explain that?
        WorldMaker 4y ago
        Sure: 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.
  - __derek__ 4y ago
    Yes, I'm sure all the charities below that line would respect the decision and not ask their donors to raise a stink to keep them in the program.
rideontime 4y ago
As a customer, I don't care if their overall impact is spread thin, it's my money going to a charity I chose.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  Technically it's Amazon's money, not yours. You can't write the donations off on your taxes, for example.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Exactly. If you want to donate, do it first-hand rather than second-hand via another organization, in order to be more tax-effective.
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      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$
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Maybe I'm out of the loop but why not?
    - Alupis 4y ago
      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.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        I see, thank you
darth_avocado 4y ago
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.
- widowlark 4y ago
  not based on every other statement in this thread. do you have evidence of this assertion?
- xyzelement 4y ago
  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.
  - luisapic 4y ago
    [dead]
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  That's truest of the big ones, imo. "Power corrupts" etc., even when that power is a non-profit. I upvoted you since the sentiment is correct. The nice thing about AmazonSmile is that you could pick from the small ones you know well and trust. Now, Amazon will donate to the biggest ones without our choice, which is definitely worse.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
And seriously, why should that matter; it's their customers who are selecting the charities, not Amazon.
- smcin 4y ago
  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.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    Even worse, an anti-PR opportunity: “look at how much money Amazon donates to bad guys!”
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    > 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. same
sakisv 4y ago
Or, better yet, go from 0.5% to 0.6% or 1%.
fallinghawks 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The local gas station gives me 5% off for using their card AND 5% to a local charity.
bdw5204 4y ago
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.

spookthesunset 4y ago

Which charities should be remain?

perlgeek 4y ago
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.
- gharman 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    - fakedang 4y ago
      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. Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee.
      - arbitrage 4y ago
        > Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee. Is the money that good?
        midasuni 4y ago
        Only if you cause untold misery to millions of charities
        fakedang 4y ago
        I don't know. Just received the offer last month.
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        > Source: I'm a dumbass MBA admittee. Ya sure this is what you learn in school? > a sizeable contribution to their end of year bonus figure Highly doubt they’re getting bonuses at Amazon.
        fakedang 4y ago
        I don't know, just received the offer last month. Bonus or not, some line item adjustments do put you in line for promotions.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      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.)
      - smcin 4y ago
        > reduce and launder affiliate links and ad spam Can you explain that?
        WorldMaker 4y ago
        Sure: 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.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  Yes, I'm sure all the charities below that line would respect the decision and not ask their donors to raise a stink to keep them in the program.

rideontime 4y ago

As a customer, I don't care if their overall impact is spread thin, it's my money going to a charity I chose.

jaywalk 4y ago
Technically it's Amazon's money, not yours. You can't write the donations off on your taxes, for example.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Exactly. If you want to donate, do it first-hand rather than second-hand via another organization, in order to be more tax-effective.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    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$
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Maybe I'm out of the loop but why not?
  - Alupis 4y ago
    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.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I see, thank you

darth_avocado 4y ago

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.

widowlark 4y ago
not based on every other statement in this thread. do you have evidence of this assertion?
xyzelement 4y ago
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.
- luisapic 4y ago
  [dead]
llanowarelves 4y ago
That's truest of the big ones, imo. "Power corrupts" etc., even when that power is a non-profit. I upvoted you since the sentiment is correct. The nice thing about AmazonSmile is that you could pick from the small ones you know well and trust. Now, Amazon will donate to the biggest ones without our choice, which is definitely worse.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

And seriously, why should that matter; it's their customers who are selecting the charities, not Amazon.

smcin 4y ago
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.
- philwelch 4y ago
  Even worse, an anti-PR opportunity: “look at how much money Amazon donates to bad guys!”
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > 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. same

sakisv 4y ago

Or, better yet, go from 0.5% to 0.6% or 1%.

fallinghawks 4y ago

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.

bombcar 4y ago
The local gas station gives me 5% off for using their card AND 5% to a local charity.

bdw5204 4y ago

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.