on Smile is frowned upon //
It’s almost a decade since the first meeting.
We’re offering 5% to our affiliates for referring customers. We can pay charities 10% and call it a donation. It’ll be great PR. And we’ll make a profit every time we sell because we won’t have to pay a full Commission
Although Amazon did not invent the concept of an online affiliate, it has made it a powerful growth engine. Referrers would be paid $5 if a customer bought $100 of an item linked to by someone in their program. This meant that they could not make a profit, but it resulted in millions of customers who returned again and again. You could also turn one sale into several…
Amazon has paid billions in affiliate fees and many affiliates (like Wirecutter and CoolTools) have built entire businesses around the idea of recommending products and sending people to the largest online retailer to purchase them.
Smile has turned over a million charities into affiliates at an affordable rate. You now have 40 cents to donate to the cause you choose with a $100 purchase.
My dear readers used to receive Smile links from me. But when I realized the value of each donation, I switched to Geni.us and our donations increased 10x.
Amazon Smile has already sent more than $500,000,000 to charities. It’s not a donation, but a marketing allocation. They are a significant corporate donor, with half a million dollars making them one of the largest corporate donors worldwide.
Why cancel the program?
Let me make a few guesses.
- Amazon’s new management is focusing on streamlining expenses and programs to increase profitability and focus. It was difficult to justify programs that required a lot of time and people.
- The program has been poorly explained by them, which is evident in the fact that many people were shocked at the large amount of donations.
- Many charities don’t have the best affiliates. I suspect that very few of the millions of recipients were able to convince their donors to purchase from the smile link that was donated to them.
- Perhaps most importantly, Amazon continues to be the dominant online retailer, so the importance of the affiliate program may diminish. However, cutting costs on this front may seem like an easy way to increase short-term profits.
The West’s industrial culture has struggled to think about charity, even back to Community Chest or the United Way. Sending money to charities seems to be a way to subvert the game of maximising profit. Some argue that corporations have a corporate responsibility to the community. This means that they agree to take less profit than they can and invest in the long-term wellbeing of their communities. It could also be a marketing tool, as is often the case.
