Amazon Smile Gets a Frown | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Smile Gets a Frown

seths.blog

113 pointsgmays30 comments

Recent and related:

Amazon Closing AmazonSmile - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338 - Jan 2023 (550 comments)

> Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, it’ll be great PR and we’ll also make a profit on every sale because we won’t need to pay a full commission…”

This is a very good point. When a customer goes to the Smile URL it supersedes whatever other referral link they might have come through, or might be lingering from a prior search/click. Given this framing, it's hard to understand why they would have eliminated it. My uninformed guess is this is about simplicity and saying 'no' to things that are not core to the business. This is something that makes money, but after factoring in the dev time that goes into it, the total incremental revenue is probably not large enough to justify. Amazon says 'no' to lots of new things that would generate revenue, so at some point it makes sense to cut existing programs that aren't making a big enough impact.

I often wondered why it was a different URL and that it wasn't enabled by default. This is explains it really clearly why it always felt disingenuous. Thanks.

I always assumed that Smile was about making customers who might have clicked an affiliate link switch over to the Smile site so they could avoid paying that referral rather than trying to make charities into affilites as the article suggested. I know I always did it.

Perhaps more people were moving from the base, affiliate-less Amazon site to Smile than from affiliate links, by a large enough margin that the payouts were a net cost even after factoring the savings on those that had come via affiliate links. This is believable: I bookmarked the Smile site and very rarely click affiliate links.

Would be hard (but not impossible) to believe the cost of developing or maintaining this programme was a significant factor at their scale.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...

>Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google

>The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006

>smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link

This doesn't make any sense. Amazon can choose to pay Google per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is already up to Amazon. They don't need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping.

(Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google's estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they'll put in on your behalf are lower, and you'll lose lots of auctions you'd have preferred to win.)

I would also be surprised if Amazon were paying Google on a per-conversion basis, since I bet Amazon wants to do their optimization in-house.

Now, if you said this was a sneaky way to cut down on their affiliate commissions that could make sense.

(I used to work at Google, on display ads, but none of the above is based on internal information).

I thought the same, but others here were arguing that smile and affiliate were separate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592

Amazon affiliates referral payments are based on the last referrer within 24hours of an order. Eg, you can click an affiliate link, not buy the item and then buy something unrelated 12 hours later and the affiliate will still get the commission. (As long as you didn’t click a different affiliate’s link).

I know this is awful, but I always doubted the benevolence of the Amazon smile program and figured they viewed at as a nice tax write off. That being said, I am sure there were plenty of non-profits that benefited from the program.

Maybe too much money was going to non-profits Amazon doesn't approve of?

The thing that keeps coming to mind is that they dealt with tens of thousands of charities, with the potential of requiring expensive customer service.

The cost of running the program is surely a good fraction of the total amount donated.

Did they actually deal with the charities directly, or through one of well-established platforms like e.g. Benevity?

Couldn’t tell you, but who would ultimately have to answer for payouts being incorrect, etc.? I’m imagining hundreds or thousands of questions like “why am I only getting $2 this quarter when I got $10 last quarter”

You’d get a check once or more a year based on how much you had coming.

Our little league would make a few hundred bucks a year off of it. About half was board members buying stuff for the league. You really had to push it to make anything - the most successful example I found was a league that used the same logo as a college sports team across the country. They made a “store” for parent gear that just went to Amazon Smile links.

Amazon was super easy to setup, but there are many companies with better programs in the space.

It’s effective altruism

Ah come on, it’s amazon and Bezos we’re talking about here… hardly paragons of virtue.

That's exactly what "effective altruism" means. It's just philosophical marketing to dress the basest selfishness as altruism. Google the phrase up the next time you feel you have too much faith in humanity.

Figuring out which charities 1. aren’t scams; 2. aren’t wasting 90% of your money on on overhead; and 3. are doing something impactful rather than something frivolous with your money, is “the basest selfishness”?

If that’s not how you personally define Effective Altruism, then what name would you give to the concept I just described?

That's not what "Effective Altruism" is. [1]

Effective altruism plays the game where you can say "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest that $10 and then give it away when I die?" It's all about coming up with scenarios like this where you can justify selfishness because "eventually, the amount of good I'll do will pay off".

It's popular with the rich and famous because they can justify building huge empires and hording large amounts of resources (while spending a bit on themselves of course) because, some day, they'll give back what they made.

It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

It's changed a lot since Peter Singer started it but what it's really supposed to mean is, "stop donating to the opera house, kids are dying in Africa."

>Effective altruism plays the game where you can say "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest that $10 and then give it away when I die?"

All of this seems to have little resemblance to what I see in the EA community. Specifically, I'm seeing many EA organizations doing good in the now and present (eg. malaria nets), and have never heard of any EA organizations advocating people to invest money so they can donate money.

>It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.

You don't see the issue of using a single person to paint an entire movement, especially since the movement explicitly disavows illegal actions to raise money?

Google result:

> Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

Doesn't sound that bad.

How would it be a tax write-off? Or are you one of the many many people who think "tax write-off" is some mysterious financial trick to turn a loss into profit?

the venn diagram of "corporations are always evil no matter what" people and "haha i cannot do math but i know whats right and wrong" people has a huge overlap

You don’t think Amazon can say “we donated x dollars of our revenue to 501c charities based on amazing smile contributions and we’re deducting it off our gross revenue”?

Of course they can, but Amazon would have made _more_ money if they just kept the money and didn't donate it to anyone.

However on the internet, people seem to believe "tax write-off" means Amazon is coming out equal or even net-positive compared to not donating the money.

I read somewhere that it was a way to get you into the habit of going directly to Amazon rather than searching for the product on Google and then clicking the first retailer. That's why you had to type smile.amazon.com directly into your browser. So in that way, it earned them a huge amount of customer loyalty.

Also discussed 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338 (560 comments)

My best guess is that Amazon have just moved the Amazon Smile team to do something else that may bring more money. Sometimes someone may want to do something good in companies like Amazon, but in the end, corporate structure will optimize for achieving maximum bonuses.

> I used to send you, my esteemed readers, to Smile links, but when I realized how little each donation was, I switched to geni.us, and so our donations went up 10x.

How does that work? Is there some way for other charities to use it that they should know about?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com