AmazonSmile, the program that directed a portion of the profits of links tagged smile.amazon.com, or purchased via an app that was connected to Smile, to a charity of the customer’s choosing, is going away after almost decade in operation.
The reason listed seems to be that they didn’t feel they were having an impact and were changing course, but small charities and non profits like my kid’s PTO can be held up as examples that they were. Those dollars could change lives quite often.
In other words they’re taking that 1% and using it how Amazon sees fit as opposed to how their customers wanted their slack donations to go. Are they going to increase the funding of their charitable initiatives? Not in the email.
The shutdown will be Feb 20, 2023 and charities and organizations will receive an estimated three months worth of donations at that point.
On the web side, encouraging this behavior and slack required blogs like ours to manually change links made with the Amazon link builder, not use short links, and wasn’t a slackable thing as I recall… always build the link, disregard the short link show full link, copy full link, paste, change www.amazon to smile.amazon, repeat.
For those who slacktively participated and had chosen a charity in the app, Amazon will be keeping that 1% after Feb 20, 2023.
Anyway charities, you’ve got your 30 days or so notice and now you can… figure out how to slacktively create an income stream from your followers.
