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It's mostly just tax avoidance, right?

• IgorPartola 4y ago
  The way I understand it is that Amazon offers an affiliate fee to affiliates. When you don’t go through an affiliate they get to keep the small percentage. Smile was basically Amazon’s own affiliate program that paid out to NGOs. It did reduce their tax liability but it’s not like it’s free money. Assuming a corporate rate of 15%, when Amazon pays a charity $100, they save $15 on taxes. That mean they spent $85, so not exactly tax avoidance unless the charity they donate to is also owned by Amazon or some such.
• waynesonfire 4y ago
  or a talking point. government and business work very closely together and when these two negotiate, the government likes to see philanthropy.
• tpmoney 4y ago
  Only in the sense that money that would have been taxed as income was instead paid to charities. Simplified example, they took in $200 and paid $50 of that to a charity. At 10% they paid $15 in taxes instead of $20. If you think charities are overall a net positive (and especially if you think they’re more efficient at getting money to the right places than the government) a loss of $5 in government revenue for $50 into charities seems like a good deal
• Rebelgecko 4y ago
  How so? Taxable income is pretty much always better than 0 income
• stevenwoo 4y ago
  There's a comment on reddit by someone who claimed to be working on this when it was started - the entire program was to avoid paying money to Google for searches resulting in sales on Amazon, by making Amazon the first place to go instead of Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...