You shop on Amazon a lot, right? So why not make Amazon give to charity whenever you do? AmazonSmile is a simple and easy way to give a little money to a charity of your choice every time you buy something on Amazon. If you shop at smile.amazon.com (instead of www.amazon.com), Amazon will donate 0.5% of the purchase price of whatever you buy to your chosen charity. You pay nothing extra, so there’s no reason not to do it.
You can even install a browser extension that automatically redirects you to smile.amazon.com every time you visit Amazon, so you never need to remember it yourself. Let’s get started.
Step One: Choose Your Charity
There are over a million charities registered with AmazonSmile. The first time you visit smile.amazon.com, you’ll be prompted to select one.
Amazon has five “Spotlight Charities” that they’re promoting, but you can use the search box to find a different one to support. Most major American charities are available.
Once you’ve decided on a charity, click Select and any purchases you make will support it.
If you can’t remember what charity you chose, you can see what charity you’re supporting underneath the Amazon search bar.
To choose a different charity to support, go to your Amazon Account page.
Under Settings, select Change Your Charity.
Once again, you can pick from one of the Spotlight charities or search for your own.
Step Two: Automatically Load AmazonSmile Every Time
For AmazonSmile to work, you actually need to visit smile.amazon.com whenever you want to buy something. Nothing you purchase from the regular Amazon site counts.
If you remember to go to AmazonSmile yourself, that’s awesome. For most people, the best thing to do is add a browser extension that automatically redirects you:
- For Google Chrome, check out Smile Always.
- For Firefox, check out Smile Redirect.
- For Safari, check out KeepOnSmiling.
I couldn’t find any extension that redirects you to AmazonSmile for Microsoft Edge; if you know of one, please let us know and we’ll add it to this post.
AmazonSmile is a great way to send a little extra money to a charity you support every year. All you have to do is remember to go to smile.amazon.com or use an extension to redirect you. Amazon will do the rest.