Amazon Smile has been around for some time in the US, enabling users who purchase from amazon.com to gift a percentage of their purchase price to the charity of their choice, according to public record the amount donated to date is over $69 million!
Amazon Smile has (as of the end of last year) come to amazon.co.uk so if you purchase goods from the UK Amazon site then you can sign up to send a small percentage of your spend direct to your favourite charity.
In order to use Amazon Smile, you first need to have an amazon.co.uk account. Once you have one opened, then go to https://smile.amazon.co.uk and enter your Amazon account details, from here you will be taken to a screen where you can search for and select the charity that you would like to benefit from your shopping – you can change the charity at any time you like.
That’s it, you’re now all set up – just shop away and your chosen charity will benefit from 0.5% of your shopping; sure it’s not much but if enough people do the same thing then it will build up and in any case, every little helps.
The one thing that is critically important to remember is that your charity will only benefit is you use the smile address when you start shopping – you MUST go to https://smile.amazon.co.uk in order to start shopping. If you don’t do this and you use the normal Amazon website address then your charity will not benefit at all.
If you run or help out at a charity and you would like to register to start receiving benefits from Amazon Smile then you should go to https://org.amazon.co.uk and follow the process to enroll, you are required to be an official administrator of the charity and you will have to upload some official documentation and bank details.
Once registered you will be paid quarterly as long as the donations exceed £5.00 – the more your supporters use the https://smile.amazon.co.uk service, the more Amazon will send you.