Amazon closes the Amazon Smile charity program: “too many associations to have a real impact”

In these hours Amazon has sent an email to customers registered with AmazonSmile to warn them that the program will be closed by February 20, 2023. AmazonSmile was a program that allowed you to contribute 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to a chosen cause freely by the user from a list of associations adhering to the programme.

Basically, for every €2 spent, the user could choose to allocate €0.01 to a non-profit . In the past, the program had been the subject of some controversy, for example because some media had discovered that some NoVax thinktanks were also present among the list of non-profit members of AmazonSmile.

On an individual basis, the donations were obviously quite small. But the program takes on a completely different light when you consider that Amazon Prime has millions of subscribers around the world and that cumulatively the sums donated each year could definitely leave a big impact.

The problem – as Amazon explains in its press release – is that this significant figure was divided by a galaxy made up of over 1 million non-profits, NGOs and non-profit organizations. Too many for Amazon Prime to bring real benefit to each of them.

Dear Customer, In 2013, we launched Amazon Smile to help users support their favorite non-profit organizations. However, after nearly a decade, the program has not grown enough to create the impact on the world they originally envisioned. With so many eligible organizations – more than 1 million globally – our ability to make an impact was often too dispersed

reads the email sent by Amazon to users who had joined. The giant explained that the closure of the program does not mark the end of Amazon’s interest in charity and that the company will reorganize its resources to contribute more efficiently to the finances of organizations working on some of the most important challenges that our society is called upon to solve.