AmazonFrown
January 19, 2023 2:32 PM   Subscribe

Amazon Ends AmazonSmile as of February 20.

"After almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations — more than 1 million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin."
posted by MollyRealized (52 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup



 
"We discovered that giving away some of our money was not leading to positive press and increased profits as we had hoped, so we are going to just keep it all now."
posted by cubby at 2:34 PM on January 19, 2023 [98 favorites]


What is a financial dust note to Amazon could make a significant difference to a small non-profit. This is really disappointing.
posted by wenestvedt at 2:41 PM on January 19, 2023 [33 favorites]


It's not too thin to a lot of those organizations!

We get hundreds of dollars every year for my sangha from Amazon Smile. It's not a lot, but it literally helps to keep the lights on.
posted by spinifex23 at 2:43 PM on January 19, 2023 [31 favorites]


I just checked and my local Girl Scout council, which I've had set up as my smile charity since the beginning, has generated approximately $2500 in smile donations total.

I was a troop leader for 5 years. $2500 is probably what it cost to run that troop for 5 years--from covering the membership dues for the girls who couldn't afford them, to the out of pocket cost from me for meeting materials, to what the girls made from fundraising. With enough left over for a pizza party.
posted by phunniemee at 2:47 PM on January 19, 2023 [34 favorites]


Yes, one of the animal charities I support got around $9000 last year--a significant sum for a smallish operation. This is too bad.
posted by praemunire at 2:48 PM on January 19, 2023 [19 favorites]


WaPo reported on this. Among other things: "But AmazonSmile also distributed more than $42,000 to nonprofit entities spreading disinformation about coronavirus vaccines, The Post has reported."
posted by Melismata at 2:51 PM on January 19, 2023 [11 favorites]


According to this Redditor, who claims to be a former Amazon employee, the whole point of Smile was actually to encourage people go directly to Amazon.com to do their shopping rather than getting there via Google and thus reduce the amount of money Amazon was paying Google for traffic. The program was supposedly created by Amazon's Traffic Optimization team, with the idea that they'd save more than they were donating, and get some good PR out of it at the same time.
posted by Naberius at 2:55 PM on January 19, 2023 [46 favorites]


@Naberius beat me to posting the reddit link. It's hearsay, but it seems credible to me. The Smile program never made sense to me before, but it makes a lot more sense with the context that that nothing about the program was motivated by a desire to support charities. And of course this means that the program was killed with no concern for its impact on those charities, despite what Amazon may claim in their public statements.
posted by angrynerd at 3:00 PM on January 19, 2023 [7 favorites]


My immediate take was twofold: that they're not getting enough PR credit for giving away money and that they're giving away too much money, which seems like more of an affiliate link problem than an actual Amazon problem. As in, a lot of the money from Smile as used on the phone/tablet app would normally have gone to an affiliate whose link the purchaser would have arrived from. I had my apps set up so every time I purchased anything on the app, my charity of choice got the credit, and I tried to do most of my purchases on the app for that reason.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:01 PM on January 19, 2023 [3 favorites]


Wow I hate this, I’ve really cut back on using Amazon but I liked seeing that the little raptor center I choose as my charity was getting money.

Although if as an early poster said the hope was to circumvent google I did not help with that, I’d still end up using google to find the item, then going to the smile link to purchase.
posted by lepus at 3:03 PM on January 19, 2023 [8 favorites]


I just checked and I have steered a bit over $14 to Against Malaria via Amazon Smile. Not much, but that bought about seven long-lasting insecticidal mosquito nets.

On the other hand, even a very small annual donation would exceed that on a yearly basis.

On the grasping hand, that's one more thing I need to remember to do.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:23 PM on January 19, 2023 [10 favorites]


I stopped using Smile (many years ago now) when I realized that (a) they did not provide any rewards points on my credit card if I made my purchase through Smile, and (b) the percentage of the purchase that went to the nonprofit was considerably less than the 5% kickback they would otherwise have provided to my credit card.

So Amazon was actually increasing its net profit when I used Smile, and only kicking back a small portion of those gains to the nonprofit; it was considerably better for me to take the kickback and then make a donation on my own.

So I'm a little skeptical of the idea that a scam like this wasn't profitable. How could it not be, when they were making money on every transaction? But perhaps there is something I'm missing.
posted by Not A Thing at 3:23 PM on January 19, 2023 [9 favorites]


The charity I support has received $7500 (not sure when the program started), but that's still a nice chunk of change. I am bothered by this turn of events, so I decided to try to get my feelings to Amazon. I found a spot where I could chat with an associate, who they say is human, but I'm not quite sure.

For amusement, here are some screen grabs of our conversation. Maybe if enough people register complaints they'll reconsider removing Smile. It's the only redeeming thing about Amazon, and that's still a stretch.
posted by hydra77 at 3:37 PM on January 19, 2023 [5 favorites]


the 5% kickback they would otherwise have provided to my credit card

? Not even Amex is at 5% as a card (though interchange fees on its own network might push it over). If you're talking about Amazon rewards points, those don't actually pencil at 1 cent per in value to Amazon.
posted by praemunire at 3:44 PM on January 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Verge have a suggestion on this:

Still, sometimes I wish that the PR departments of these corporations could bring themselves to be a little more honest about these things. Instead of a long screed about how ineffective a 10-year-old charitable program was and how the company is still going to be a good citizen and help deserving people, I think Amazon could have simply sent out a note saying:
Dear customers: 

Times are hard. Manufacturing costs are up, prices are skyrocketing, our customers are balking at the increased cost of Amazon Prime, we’re facing a variety of lawsuits, and lawyers are expensive. As a result, even though our sales are up 15 percent year over year, our shareholders are getting nervous. So we’re looking for ways to cut corners — such as laying off about 18,000 of our employees and dropping our charitable AmazonSmile program so that we can keep every penny of what you spend on our site.

Sorry about that.

All our best,
Amazon
posted by Lanark at 3:44 PM on January 19, 2023 [37 favorites]


At one point this news would have disappointed me but in the past 10 years (not that it only started ten years ago, but I admit I was willing to look the other way longer than I should have) I've found so many other reasons to direct my shopping to anybody but Amazon that I no longer have any significant business that I can withhold from them. Of course they're making decisions that will make the world a worse place for everyone but Amazon shareholders. After so many examples of who they are, why would I ever expect otherwise?
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:50 PM on January 19, 2023 [11 favorites]


I did not even know this was a thing and would have used it if I did, to support y’all’s community programs. :(
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:00 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I'd almost consider going in through Google just out of spite, but they don't deserve the money either.
posted by Soliloquy at 4:00 PM on January 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


Not even Amex is at 5% as a card

It doesn't really matter and I don't know what sorts of accounting shenanigans may be involved, but Chase Amazon Visa gives me 5% back on Amazon purchases, which I can withdraw to my (non-Chase) bank account as cash.

The point I discovered that this stopped working with Amazon Smile is also the point at which I stopped using Amazon Smile, so maybe it is/was different now, but at that time the kickback went straight from 5% if I didn't use Smile to 0% if I did. So if I kept the cash and just sent the nonprofit half of it, everyone (except Amazon, I guess) would come out ahead. It just made the whole thing seem like a pretty brazen money grab on Amazon's part.
posted by Not A Thing at 4:04 PM on January 19, 2023 [5 favorites]


I didn't even realize you had to buy off *smile*amazon.com every time for the charity thing. No wonder I never made mine any money.

This feels super huckstery now, knowing the truth.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:14 PM on January 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


Every time I feel regret about dropping Amazon over their union busting and other evils, something like this happens. I know some folks can't, but if you can, there's still plenty of ways to buy what you need.
posted by emjaybee at 4:16 PM on January 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


Amazon also today laid off most or all of the employees of Comixology, a once-excellent digital comics retailer that Amazon bought and turned to shit for no reason that anyone really understands. All they had to do was leave it alone and let it continue to generate a miniscule profit; instead they broke it, and it makes them nothing. I guess I'd need an MBA to get these brilliant decisions...
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:18 PM on January 19, 2023 [22 favorites]


It’s weird that a man who figured out how to direct a considerable portion of the world’s retail into his own pocket couldn’t figure out how to direct any of it into the pockets of charities.
posted by gauche at 4:21 PM on January 19, 2023 [13 favorites]


It doesn't really matter and I don't know what sorts of accounting shenanigans may be involved, but Chase Amazon Visa gives me 5% back on Amazon purchases, which I can withdraw to my (non-Chase) bank account as cash.

The point I discovered that this stopped working with Amazon Smile is also the point at which I stopped using Amazon Smile, so maybe it is/was different now, but at that time the kickback went straight from 5% if I didn't use Smile to 0% if I did.
Maybe this was the case at some point, but I have the same card, and it definitely isn’t the case now nor has it been for as long as i’ve had the card.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:24 PM on January 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer has Smile's 2018 IRS Form 990-PF with the list of every charity that received money from Amazon Smile in that year (2019 and 2020 aren't available yet). It's a 260MB PDF with 2,000+ highly packed pages.

The 5 largest recipients that year were the ASPCA (1.8 Million), St Jude's Children's Research Hospital (1.5M), The Nature Conservancy (839K), American Red Cross (811K), and Wounded Warrior Project (789K). It's been noted that St Jude was the default recipient when you signed up.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:42 PM on January 19, 2023 [5 favorites]


Let's see what charitable impact amazon can create (for shareholders) now! 🍾🎉
posted by nikoniko at 4:51 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


So Mackenzie Scott is doing absolutely fabulous work for charities.

And her ex isn't.

What a coincidence.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 5:10 PM on January 19, 2023 [23 favorites]


I'm truly sorry about the loss to charities, but on the other hand I hated seeing my local library basically shill for Amazon by pushing that link. I would have liked to see them encourage patrons to use Amazon less, and buy less or buy local instead.
posted by evilmomlady at 5:10 PM on January 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


Amazon also today laid off most or all of the employees of Comixology, a once-excellent digital comics retailer that Amazon bought and turned to shit for no reason that anyone really understands. All they had to do was leave it alone and let it continue to generate a miniscule profit; instead they broke it, and it makes them nothing. I guess I'd need an MBA to get these brilliant decisions...

They killed fabric.com too, which was a wonderful place to buy fabric online. How come it didn’t make a profit? Because Amazon didn’t want the hassle of making people buy by the yard, or something, and insisted that vendors cut their fabrics into 2-yard lengths. Yeah, no.
posted by Melismata at 5:27 PM on January 19, 2023 [11 favorites]


BRB, setting a calendar reminder to cancel Prime on February 20.

I’ve been meaning to for a long while, I don’t really know why this is the thing that tipped the scales, but it did.

I wonder how many other people feel the same way.
posted by box at 5:39 PM on January 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


1. Make them pay their damn taxes
2. Use taxes to fund grants to worthy causes
3. Ban businesses of Amazon's size from being privately owned or publicly traded; if they want to be that big they need to be an employee-customer cooperative. Anything else is incompatible with democracy.
posted by biogeo at 5:47 PM on January 19, 2023 [24 favorites]


Dang…bad news for my supported charity. But it’s the spur I needed to finally get rid of Amazon Prime.
posted by darkstar at 6:13 PM on January 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


Ugh to this :-( but kudos to MollyRealized for the clever title!! :-D
posted by smorgasbord at 6:24 PM on January 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


What is a financial dust note to Amazon could make a significant difference to a small non-profit.

I designated my regional Food Bank for Smile donations, and I'm sure they appreciated the couple of hundred bucks per quarter.
posted by mikelieman at 6:31 PM on January 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


Not even Amex is at 5% as a card (though interchange fees on its own network might push it over). If you're talking about Amazon rewards points, those don't actually pencil at 1 cent per in value to Amazon.

FWIW, I have a BofA card that does 3 percent cash back with a 75% boost for doing other business with them (a brokerage account mostly) that ends up at 5.25% with no Prime subscription required. Just.... you have to be a BofA customer....

Also: certain cards will actually forgive small balances (typically under a dollar). So you could imagine keeping old cards around just to run up a sixty bucks a year in free amazon gift card balance, donate 50 bucks a year to your target charity, and come out ahead of what the smile program was doing.
posted by pwnguin at 6:52 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I wouldn't be even half surprised to find that this is essentially a consequence of the GOP tax changes re: charitable donations.
posted by aramaic at 7:08 PM on January 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


I was the the treasurer for a small local non-profit. We’d get around $500 a year total from Amazon, but didn’t promote it heavily. Heck I think at least 5% of that was from my own shopping. Meanwhile our overall corporate giving was more than $20,000 per year.
posted by CostcoCultist at 7:09 PM on January 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


Does anyone know whether non-profits will be able to switch to affiliate links instead? I THOUGHT non-profits used to be able to use affiliate links before Amazon started the Smile program.
posted by kristi at 7:35 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


Does anyone know whether non-profits will be able to switch to affiliate links instead?

I don't think there's anything stopping them, but AFAIK they would need to set up links to specific products. The beauty of Smile was that no matter whether I was buying pants or hard drives they'd throw a few cents to the charity of my choice.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:53 PM on January 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


I wonder how many other people feel the same way.

We cancelled ours several months ago but it doesn't actually end until March. As far as I could tell the "free shipping" was just added to the retail price of things. So we weren't exactly saving there. We didn't use prime for anything else like tv or movies.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:03 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I wanted to quote more about that Reddit comment and a comment replying to it that backed it up
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, and be good overall for the brand value of Amazon. ...

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. Tax writeoff was a negligible side benefit, goodwill was just marketing fodder.
I'm so glad I read this because it finally offers an explanation for why the program at Amazon was structured the way it was. It never made sense to me; why require a special URL? Why so hard to activate a donation? Obviously it's partly just to benefit Amazon (cynically); if every single purchase had a charitable portion deducted it would cost a lot of money. But the use of a URL had a more specific purpose, to encourage folks bypassing Google. Nasty.

You know who has a corporate charity program that seems to actually be good and not be self-dealing? Facebook. Their fundraiser program really works. People say "it's my birthday give $100 to Planned Parenthood and it works. It uses Facebook's basic social media compulsions to encourage charitable donations. The company pays all the fees; every $1 you give via Facebook ends up being exactly $1 going to the charity. Sure Facebook benefits, if nothing else through goodwill. But at least it's not some monstrous SEO hack.
posted by Nelson at 9:56 PM on January 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


Adsense earnings have been falling for a few years, so most likely advertising is now so cheap, the charity program costs more than just advertising on Google.
posted by Lanark at 1:03 AM on January 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


I never use Amazon because it's flooded with dropshipped junk and they treat their workers badly, but my boyfriend does - with a caveat. He religiously made every single purchase through smile.amazon.com so that his favourite charity (pancreatic cancer research) received donations. This is incredibly disappointing.
posted by wandering zinnia at 4:07 AM on January 20, 2023 [7 favorites]


Y’all know you can just donate funds directly to your favorite charity, right? No middle man required, no fear that the funds are really being diverted.

Some employers will even set it up for you, matching your donations. I’ve been donating to a local youth org through monthly payroll deductions for a long time now.

I mean, if someone is going to get the tax credit for charitable donations, it shouldn’t be a multinational company that isn’t paying its fair share of taxes to begin with.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:46 AM on January 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


With Amazon Smile set up on the iPhone app, you have to opt into advertising push notifications. I managed to get the phone to configure them to "Deliver Silently" (I have absolutely no idea how) so never actually saw them, but it irritated me every time I noticed them in my settings. "Hey, what? I don't want those!"

I'd been assuming that that was where they were expecting to recoup the costs from: people buying stuff they would otherwise never have seen.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:21 AM on January 20, 2023


Y’all know you can just donate funds directly to your favorite charity, right?

Amazon Smile was a way to get Amazon to donate to a charity at no cost to me.
posted by Nelson at 7:22 AM on January 20, 2023 [14 favorites]


Amazon didn’t want the hassle of making people buy by the yard, or something, and insisted that vendors cut their fabrics into 2-yard lengths.

Simpson's Individual Stringettes!
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 AM on January 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


I buy quite a lot from Amazon. I signed up for Smile at the start. I'd never looked at my Smile contribution til now. I've generated $23.80 for my local food bank, which is a small fraction of my usual annual donation to them.
posted by neuron at 11:17 AM on January 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


I used to work for a small non profit that operated internationally. A quarter is more than enough to buy a year's worth of deworming pills for a child, so even a small loss is meaningful.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 12:42 PM on January 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


Maybe this was the case at some point, but I have the same card, and it definitely isn’t the case now

It's the "Prime" card here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/cobrandcard/marketing.html. And yes, 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases are still a thing. (Though, I didn't know that smile purchases didn't count.)

My kiddo's PTA got a few hundred bucks a year because of smile. It wasn't a lot, but it was more than nothing. I remain unsurprised that Amazon never really cared about giving to the charities, but it's still a bummer to see the program sunset.
posted by toxic at 2:36 PM on January 20, 2023 [2 favorites]


Amazon Smile was a way to get Amazon to donate to a charity at no cost to me.

I think you mean no additional cost to you, the money still comes from your payment (and the other 99.5% goes to Amazon).
posted by Lanark at 3:46 AM on January 21, 2023


It's the "Prime" card here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/cobrandcard/marketing.html. And yes, 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases are still a thing. (Though, I didn't know that smile purchases didn't count.)
Sorry, I guess I was unclear. I have that exact card, and my purchases have always gotten both Smile donations and 5% cashback.
posted by kickingtheground at 1:18 PM on January 21, 2023


« Older Anne of Green Gables Manuscript: L.M. Montgomery...   |   Lisa Marie Presley (February 1, 1968 – January 12... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments