Amazon Smile - The Sad End of an Era
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Amazon is, for better or worse, a large part of our lives. It generally accounts for 6 to 12% of our annual spending, and I’ve written several posts of Amazon tips, including Saving Money on Amazon.
So, I was crushed to hear that Amazon Smile, which lets you donate 0.5% of all of your purchases to Amazon simply by starting your shopping at smile.amazon.com (or following a few steps in the app) will end on February 20th. Charities will receive a one-time payment of an additional three months worth of earnings, and that’s it.
Since 2013, Amazon Smile has donated $450 million to charities worldwide, but Amazon claims the program’s impact was “spread too thin”. It’s true that Amazon Smile’s benefit was often small (for example, our local preschool received a cumulative $1700 over many years), but every little bit helped and it was a great way for anyone to donate to charity at zero cost to themselves.[1]
Readers have asked me about other charitable shopping options, and while I came up with a few that will donate a percentage of your purchases at many online retailers (including Goodshop and iGive), I do not recommend switching to them.
Why? Unlike Amazon Smile, which redirected 0.5% of your purchases at no cost to you, these services require you to shop through them (generally using a website, app, or browser plugin). By doing so, the service earns a referral commission from the retailer, and then shares a portion of that with your chosen charity.
Unfortunately, this disqualifies you from receiving cashback at that same retailer, and I suspect (though I have not researched this in detail) that these charitable shopping sites keep a substantial portion of the commission for themselves. If that’s the case, both you and your favorite charity would be better off with you simply earning cashback through a traditional cashback website and donating it (or better yet, donating tax-efficiently through a donor-advised fund).
So, like many readers, I am sad to see Amazon Smile go in late February. And if you haven’t used Smile yet, I urge you to do your Amazon shopping through smile.amazon.com for the next month and help your favorite charity! If anyone has any other suggestions for charitable shopping options, please contact me or post a comment.
And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
At Large with New York’s One-Man Crime Spree introduced me to the incredible work, good deeds, and brilliant performance art of Gersh Kuntzman. His series of videos of him fixing illegally-obscured license plates (warning, slightly NSFW) and calling out his neighbors (in song!) for falsely claiming out of state residence are some of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.
Also, a fascinating read about The Getty Family’s Trust Issues. How must it feel to be a 30something environmentalist whose inherited nine-figure net worth comes from decades of oil drilling?
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.
[1] Was Amazon truly being selfless, or was something in it for them? This provocative Reddit post (via Twitter) suggests that Amazon Smile was always a crafty tactic to minimize Amazon’s own traffic-acquisition costs. But whatever the motive, the program did donate hundreds of millions of dollars to charity.