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> Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, it’ll be great PR and we’ll also make a profit

> Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, it’ll be great PR and we’ll also make a profit on every sale because we won’t need to pay a full commission…” This is a very good point. When a customer goes to the Smile URL it supersedes whatever other referral link they might have come through, or might be lingering from a prior search/click. Given this framing, it's hard to understand why they would have eliminated it. My uninformed guess is this is about simplicity and saying 'no' to things that are not core to the business. This is something that makes money, but after factoring in the dev time that goes into it, the total incremental revenue is probably not large enough to justify. Amazon says 'no' to lots of new things that would generate revenue, so at some point it makes sense to cut existing programs that aren't making a big enough impact.

fortituded0002 4y ago
I often wondered why it was a different URL and that it wasn't enabled by default. This is explains it really clearly why it always felt disingenuous. Thanks.
barnabee 4y ago
I always assumed that Smile was about making customers who might have clicked an affiliate link switch over to the Smile site so they could avoid paying that referral rather than trying to make charities into affilites as the article suggested. I know I always did it. Perhaps more people were moving from the base, affiliate-less Amazon site to Smile than from affiliate links, by a large enough margin that the payouts were a net cost even after factoring the savings on those that had come via affiliate links. This is believable: I bookmarked the Smile site and very rarely click affiliate links. Would be hard (but not impossible) to believe the cost of developing or maintaining this programme was a significant factor at their scale.
password4321 4y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_... >Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google >The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 >smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link
- jefftk 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. Amazon can choose to pay Google per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is already up to Amazon. They don't need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping. (Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google's estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they'll put in on your behalf are lower, and you'll lose lots of auctions you'd have preferred to win.) I would also be surprised if Amazon were paying Google on a per-conversion basis, since I bet Amazon wants to do their optimization in-house. Now, if you said this was a sneaky way to cut down on their affiliate commissions that could make sense. (I used to work at Google, on display ads, but none of the above is based on internal information).
sokoloff 4y ago
I thought the same, but others here were arguing that smile and affiliate were separate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592
ABeeSea 4y ago
Amazon affiliates referral payments are based on the last referrer within 24hours of an order. Eg, you can click an affiliate link, not buy the item and then buy something unrelated 12 hours later and the affiliate will still get the commission. (As long as you didn’t click a different affiliate’s link).

fortituded0002 4y ago

I often wondered why it was a different URL and that it wasn't enabled by default. This is explains it really clearly why it always felt disingenuous. Thanks.

barnabee 4y ago

I always assumed that Smile was about making customers who might have clicked an affiliate link switch over to the Smile site so they could avoid paying that referral rather than trying to make charities into affilites as the article suggested. I know I always did it. Perhaps more people were moving from the base, affiliate-less Amazon site to Smile than from affiliate links, by a large enough margin that the payouts were a net cost even after factoring the savings on those that had come via affiliate links. This is believable: I bookmarked the Smile site and very rarely click affiliate links. Would be hard (but not impossible) to believe the cost of developing or maintaining this programme was a significant factor at their scale.

password4321 4y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_... >Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google >The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 >smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link

jefftk 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense. Amazon can choose to pay Google per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is already up to Amazon. They don't need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping. (Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google's estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they'll put in on your behalf are lower, and you'll lose lots of auctions you'd have preferred to win.) I would also be surprised if Amazon were paying Google on a per-conversion basis, since I bet Amazon wants to do their optimization in-house. Now, if you said this was a sneaky way to cut down on their affiliate commissions that could make sense. (I used to work at Google, on display ads, but none of the above is based on internal information).

sokoloff 4y ago

I thought the same, but others here were arguing that smile and affiliate were separate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592

ABeeSea 4y ago

Amazon affiliates referral payments are based on the last referrer within 24hours of an order. Eg, you can click an affiliate link, not buy the item and then buy something unrelated 12 hours later and the affiliate will still get the commission. (As long as you didn’t click a different affiliate’s link).