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 re

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.