>


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.
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.