>

What pisses me off is this BS statement 
‘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.’
Even a little bit helps just not Amazons bottom line, fuckers.
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. >

Was only costing them $37.7 million a year. Times must be tough over at Amazon.
/s >

Plus can't they use it as a write off and deduct any expenses they need to run it? >

No, not how that works. Any expense in the "reasonable" course of business is a deduction, so they can deduct those expenses anyways, regardless if they're for charity or not. This program was only cutting into their revenue, since they were not getting that portion of purchases that were going to charity. >

Couldn't they just write that off? >

You have to actually pay taxes before you can write off taxes for charity >

This is (part of) the reason they don't have any tax liability at the end of the year. They have write-offs like this. >

This is something that's widely understood to be true for how corporations avoid taxes but ask yourself what's your basis for believing it? Is it just because you've heard it repeated a lot? >

I used it to donate to my local food bank! This is pure corporate greed so I will definitely be rethinking most of my future amazon purchases. I strictly used smile so that some good could come from my giving money to amazon. I do prefer small & local businesses but that not an option for everything. I hope other people hurt them in their wallet enough to maybe force them to put it back? Idk I'm just pretty angry about it. Corp greed is already getting out of control for prices but I thought this little amount was something decent left. >

me too! >

Cut costs to keep their profit growing.  Because that is all that matters to their stockholders. >

Got the email today and all I could think is “are you serious?” Absolutely disappointing that they choose to discontinue charity and not look at cutting executive raises a couple bucks. I now understand why my mom was so fearful to bring a child into this world! >

I thought the same before reading the article. With over a million eligible charities they were likely spending millions a year just to administer the program and each charity was on average not benefiting much. They can probably be much more impactful by focusing their efforts. I was more shocked that only 330 something million had been donated since its inception in 2013. That seems awfully small in comparison to the volume of purchases. >

I understand the problem with so many charities but they could have changed the set up. Maybe rotate them each month, or look at removing those that are not being used or donated to yearly. The amount that Amazon donates is minimal at best. I am not a super Amazon spender, I usually only go there if I can’t get it in store. At Christmas is my big time to use Amazon because I’m not fighting a Karen or Chad for the last aluminum Turkey pan! I think the $150+ I spent on Amazon, Bert’s Big Adventure got about 50 cents. I understand businesses are here to make money but it makes me sad that companies can’t give a little more to something making a difference in the world. Mr. & Mrs. Big don’t need another lavish (insert ridiculous item here). >

I’ve worked with several non profits. Amazon donations were anywhere from $30 to $900 some months. >

LOVE YOUR NAME! Amazon writes the donations off their taxes right? And from what I remember, people are constantly complaining the company doesn’t pay their share of the taxes, so what’s $900 to them? >

No, Amazon does not write-off the donations for taxes. That’s not actually a thing. >

A corporation may deduct qualified contributions of up to 25 percent of its taxable income. Contributions that exceed that amount can carry over to the next tax year. >

But it just lowers their income by the amount donated. The general public seems to think that the benefits somehow exceed that. >

They intentionally throttled it at the beginning, specifically not offering it for purchases through the app, before finally allowing users to count app purchases if they confirmed their participation in the program twice a year even if you already signed up via the browser. I even had to use a chrome plugin to get around the dedicated link rule for browser purchases which was even more ridiculous. 
Their line of being spread thin and thousands of orgs is probably because they basically had a massive disorganized database of any registered non profit regardless if they directly participated in the program at all. I was supposedly on track to donate over $100 through smile to my local PTSA before they let me know the org had never registered with Amazon and I'd need to switch foundations. 
Feels like this was a very lazy attempt at charity at best, even as someone who was signed up from the beginning and gradually grew disillusioned. I should've expected it. >

It’s been a great program and good for the organizations who were on the ball and got in at the beginning, such as the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson where we were sending ours. >

Maybe I'm going to "discontinue" my Prime membership because their shipping timelines are ass now. >

My next day and 2 day shipping is typically 3-6 days now. >

Got the email earlier. 
And it pisses me off to no end.
They can go fuck themselves with this quote “To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will be providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022”
Amazon is alienating themselves from customers. I will for sure be looking for alternative options. 
The smile.Amazon.com option made me happy. It going away does not.
Edit:
To add. Their earnings are hurt by high inflation, resulting in lower sales. And they dare to cut the Smile program to stay out of the red???
I’d rather happily shop at individual vendors than support a billionaire’s pillar. >

The greed keeps growing. How much does Jeff need? >

Jeff hasn’t worked there for awhile.  I doubt he’s involved. >

I bet the actual CEO of Amazon loves everyone’s lack of knowledge about that, heh. >

Andy Jassy?  World famous AWS guy, Andy Jassy?