While there’s no way to prove that this person really did work there, it does sound accurate, and another commenter backed this up, with credible additional info: Even the charity programs are just designed to save Amazon money. Literally everything the company does is about profits, and extended customer lifetime value.
A team of Amazon employees whose sole purpose is doing good in the world doesn’t exist, despite employees repeatedly asking for such a team to be built in pretty much every single all-hands meeting. Amazon Smile was developed by the Traffic Optimization team, whose entire purpose is increasing efficiency and lowering costs of getting customers to Amazon. There is no way for a customer to go through the traditional shopping experience, and then during checkout decide they want to give a portion of their purchase to charity, because giving to charity isn’t the point of the overall program. Until recently, the option to use amazon smile wasn’t even available in the app, and even then the user still had to ‘renew’ being a part of Smile multiple times a year.
That’s why for the program to work, the user has to start shopping at. 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, and be good overall for the brand value of Amazon. When that type of search to purchase experience happens, Amazon has to pay google. But there’s also a large segment of customers who begin their search on google, and ends up at Amazon. So basically, when a customer wants to buy a product, they usually go straight to and enter what they’re looking for. I used to work at Amazon corporate, let me tell you how the entire program Amazon Smile got created. It was really just designed to fuck over Google and have to pay that company less in referral fees. Soon after the news broke, there was a fascinating post on Reddit from someone claiming they used to work at Amazon corporate and was around when the Smile program was launched, and claimed that the program was never designed to be as generous as it was presented. But, it appears the actual story here may be even more crazy. Some people, naturally, assumed that Amazon was doing this to claw back some of the money that it had previously been sending to the various non-profits. That would likely annoy some of the smaller charities who had benefited, but still. Of course, a simpler solution if that were really the problem would be to keep the program running, but limit the number of charities to which the money could be directed. The company noted that the “average” donation to charities was less than $230 per charity. Amazon claimed that the program “has not grown to create the impact we had originally hoped” and (perhaps reasonably!) implied that the overhead of delivering small amounts to many different charities was not very efficient. You may have heard last week that Amazon has announced the end of its “AmazonSmile” program, in which you could shop at Amazon, and a portion of all of the money you paid would actually go to the charity of your choice. Tue, Jan 24th 2023 09:24am - Mike Masnick
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