Amazon Smile: Is the program useful or not?

Amazon advertises its Smile program as a good way for online shoppers to do something good on the side while shopping. But does it even make sense to participate? We take a look at the facts.

A question of purpose: Whether Amazon Smile makes sense depends on the goal of the purchase.

Charity shopping is available from numerous providers. Due to the market position, however, Amazon Smile is one of the best-known programs.

Amazon Smile: Recommendation depends on the purpose of purchase

Whether the use of Amazon Smile makes sense or not, can be differentiated relatively easily:

• If you want to make a certain purchase at Amazon anyway, it makes sense to do so via the Smile domain, since you thereby passively donate.
• In contrast, it is less advisable to buy more specifically because of the donations. For this, the Amazon program with 0.5 percent is namely not attractive enough. Here it would make more sense to donate the money directly (without shopping detour) or to look for a charity shopping program that generates higher donation rates.

So a blanket statement is hardly possible, the recommendation (or its opposite) always depends on the shopping motivation of customers.