>

Was only costing them $37.7 million a year. Times must be tough over at Amazon.
/s
Sucks, just got the email today,  mine was going to St Jude's.  Always opened the Amazon page by typing in Smile and autofilled the rest.  Plus I could also bypass having to enter my password often checking orders by just going to smile... instead. >

Mine was the same but I didn’t get an email today.  I looked and my last email about it said this:
“This is the quarterly notification to inform you that AmazonSmile has made a charitable donation to the charity you’ve selected, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, in the amount of $780,916.62 as a result of qualifying purchases made by you and other customers who have selected this charity. “ >

Interesting. Their justification is that the donations were spread too thin, but from your email it sounds like some charities were getting a non-negligible amount of cash, so.... I call bullshit >

This was my most recent one:
"This is the quarterly notification to inform you that AmazonSmile has made a charitable donation to the charity you’ve selected, ASPCA, in the amount of $667,715.43 as a result of qualifying purchases made by you and other customers between July 1st - September 30th."
This is their listed total for my selected charity: "$15,787,389.62 to ASPCA"
So, yeah. Some of the bigger charities were getting meaningful money. >

Amazon has been getting worse and worse as a platform filled with mountains of junk and this just incentivizes me to really try and aggressively search for better prices on other platforms >

I've been doing that, but I'm so focused on avoiding Amazon that I don't insist on "better prices". Many times I've purchased something and the seller just ordered it from Amazon themselves and had it shipped to me. Do due diligence. >

I once ordered directly from the website of the company that produced a product and it came via Amazon >

Amazon fulfillment is a lot more than just Amazon.com. You can send Amazon warehouses inventory and use that inventory to fulfill orders from any outlet you wish. You can even request the warehouses to use unbranded packaging so it's less obvious. It's not necessarily dropshipping always, but most of the time it is, or liquidation reselling.
Many listings on 3p e-commerce sites are scraped and reposted by other sellers or dropshippers. Very common for importers to do that and offer a niche product to their country, all while copying the copywrite, images, and so on.
The days of e-commerce shopping is in a decline. May it be retail arbitrage, liquidation bin hunters selling as new, dropshippers or outright scammers... Legislation and regulatory bodies are much too outdated to address the concerns caused by such billion dollar companies and industries that can change light-years faster than law is capable of keeping up with. >


Amazon fulfillment is a lot more than just Amazon.com. You can send Amazon warehouses inventory and use that inventory to fulfill orders from any outlet you wish.

Yup and Amazon will comingle your stock with any stock in the warehouse which is how you get counterfeit stuff even when buying direct from Amazon. >

Eh, depends on the brand or grey hatter with good xml or batch files, but you're right that it's a big reason such occurs. 
Commingling is a huge issue, but Amazon does have some tools to not commingle. They also have a transparency program. But I'm skeptical any of that really does much in reality when warehouse bob has to process 20,000 products a day.
Commingling, along with them reselling returns deemed "resellable" where they get to charge selling fees for a returned product X amount of times are some of my biggest gripes. Who know what that return was filled with or changed for. Unlike commingling, most brands or sellers can't stop Amazon warehouses from reselling returned goods at new. It's part of the agreement when using their warehouses. No option to have returns sent back to the seller, manufacturer or brick and mortar store. It's scary how so many big corporations don't even follow their own rules, and even law, while imposing them on those they want. >

This guy sells. >

Amazon was donating 0.5% of each order. So 1¢ out of every $2 spent. >

And making you jump through hoops to do it >

I mean, I went to the website and typed in mine like 3 or so years ago and it's just been working that way ever since. >

They could've solved this in the past year or two so please correct me if I'm wrong, but you had to use the Amazon smile link specifically for purchases which is why I have always used the chrome plugin to redirect. And also the twice a year confirmation on the app if you wanted purchases to count as well besides the browser confirmation >

You typed in smile.amazon.com not exactly necessary of needing a plugin for that. >

Even manually having to add that to a third party link off Google is exactly the hoop the plugin helped you avoid. Just one small use case >

I guess.  You  literally had to just type replace www with smile.  To each their own though. >

Got the email and immediately came to Reddit to be part of the Firestorm. It's a BS move on Amazons part with an even more BS excuse behind the reasoning. 
I'd like to see them backtrack if there are enough people complaining. But we all know that won't do a thing. >

My plan is to cancel my prime membership and donate that monthly cost to my smile charity. So, thanks Amazon for giving me that final reason to cancel! >

I’m beyond pissed off that they’re discontinuing this program. I dedicate mine to a local dog rescue and their Smile donations are a big part of their annual budget. This is going to seriously hurt them, along with many other smaller charities. I’ll help make up for it by increasing my direct donations, but this just feels slimy and gross of Amazon. >

Well, the Amazon high-ups are slimy and gross people.  I've been using it as well and I'm going to be cutting back as much as I can.