This is fantastic!<p>To save the most lives, select Against Malaria Foundation as your charity. It's the current top recommendation from Givewell (<a href="http://www.givewell.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.givewell.org</a>), an excellent charity evaluation organization. They focus on proven cost-effectiveness and transparency.<p>AMF can save lives at a rate of $2500 or so per life saved, which vastly outperforms most other giving opportunities, at least if you require a high standard of evidence. Givewell's evaluation of AMF is here: <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF" rel="nofollow">http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF</a>
The first thing I thought when I saw this was awesome!<p>The second thing I thought was that I'd never remember to use it.<p>Just whipped up a tiny little chrome extension that will always redirect you to smile.amazon.com when you go to Amazon. It's not well tested, so could screw you up a bunch, but figured I'd share.<p><a href="https://github.com/jessepollak/smile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jessepollak/smile</a>
Errr, out of 1 million eligible 501c's how many are "controversial"? as in political shills or fronts for religious nut jobs?<p>I wonder how Amazon plans to deal with the inevitable "why did you donate to a charity supporting / opposing $ISSUE?<p>Edit: well kids that's what happens if you comment before coffee - a negative take on something that has a decent potential to up the level of giving USA wide by a huge margin. Visit givewell.org and choose your favourite.<p>may as well make that prime account count - let me know when the UK can join in too.
FWIW, I work helping the non-profit site www.thegivingmachine.co.uk. We give 2.25% of purchases tracked through our site from Amazon (plus some other retailers).<p>We also have a lot of other merchants signed up.
Amazon may be making <i>more</i> profit on these purchases, rather than less--utilizing the potent marketing skills of non-profit organizations to direct more dollars to Amazon without Amazon having to pay higher affiliate fees. I'm not an expert, but I think Amazon's affiliate fees can be as high as 10% of the purchase price. 0.5% is a 20x cheaper customer acquisition cost.
There's a catch... It only works if you go to <a href="http://smile.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">http://smile.amazon.com</a>, using the regular amazon won't do anything.
I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to incorporate one's own charity these days.<p>A 0.5% effective rebate on everything you purchase on Amazon is better than many bank accounts offer...