We all have charitable causes we like to support, whether they help children, the environment, medical research, or any other issue we care about. Wouldn’t it be great if we could generate donations for charities just by doing things we already do every day?
Amazon has a program called Amazon Smile that will automatically donate 0.5% of all your Amazon purchases to the charity of your choice!
In order to start generating donations, you have to go to smile.amazon.com and log in with your regular Amazon account. You can then choose from over a million 501c3 charities that have already registered with Amazon Smile (don’t worry, you can change your selected charity at any time). If you don’t see a particular charitable organization listed, reach out to them and have them register at org.amazon.com.
It’s as easy as that! To have 0.5% of your purchase prices get donated to your charity by the Amazon Foundation, you have to do your shopping at smile.amazon.com, which is simply a branded clone of Amazon, instead of regular amazon.com. Also remember that Amazon Smile is not integrated into the Amazon Shopping mobile apps, so if you’re going to make a large purchase, make sure you do so in a web browser at smile.amazon.com. (Update: Amazon Smile is now supported in the Amazon Shopping mobile app for Android! Read more here.)
When you check out, you will see the name of your selected charity listed below your order total in the right sidebar, which helps you know that a portion of your purchase will be donated to your charity. Unlike those stores that pressure you to make a donation at the cash register, Amazon will donate a portion of your purchase price at no extra cost to you all by themselves. Your purchase on Amazon Smile costs the exact same as it would on regular Amazon.
Amazon makes it easy to see the impact you’ve made. Just click on the dropdown next to your charity’s name in the Amazon Smile header and you will see a bubble with the total amount you have helped donate as well as the grand total of all donations generated by Amazon Smile. Click on “Your AmazonSmile impact” to see more details like your total number of orders made on Amazon Smile and the total amount your selected charity has received from Amazon Smile thanks to all shoppers.
Eventually, you will start typing in smile.amazon.com by habit when you want to shop on Amazon. But if you find yourself struggling to remember to go to the Amazon Smile url, you can add an Amazon Smile button to your bookmarks toolbar. And although we have not tried them, there are also extensions for Chrome and Firefox that will automatically redirect you from Amazon to Amazon Smile.
Even though we’ve only been able to help raise about $17 for our charity thus far, Amazon Smile as a whole has donated over $156 million to charities worldwide as of November 2019. So while we may only help donate a few dollars on our own, when combined with the other millions of Amazon shoppers, our generated donations can make a big impact!