
Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon - jhaimson
http://www.smilealways.io
======
kcorbitt
This is a great cause. Just one concern: I understand the desire to quantify
the difference you're making in the world, but seeing the counter that
(currently) says "66 redirects have been made with this extension!" actually
influenced me to not install the extension. It seems like the implementation
of that could easily leak the list of things I look at on Amazon to you or
others, and it shouldn't need to "phone home" like that to function as an
extension. If you remove that you'll have another happy giver. :)

~~~
jhaimson
I completely understand - this was one of our major concerns when we were
deciding whether or not we should count redirects. If you look at the function
incrementCounter() in the code
([https://github.com/Jdhaimson/smilealways/blob/master/chromep...](https://github.com/Jdhaimson/smilealways/blob/master/chromeplugin/request.js))
you can see that all we are doing is pinging the server without passing any
information along to increment a counter each time someone is redirected.

That being said, I think I will take it off of the site because it can be
scary if you don't look at the code. Thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
mrigor
Without rate limiting it looks be to susceptible to abuse.

~~~
jhaimson
Yeah, I realize this method is open to abuse. I just figured that the counter
really was more of a "nice-to-have" so I can see how many times it was
working, but if someone really wanted to abuse it than it wouldn't be that big
of an issue. I'd have an incorrect count, but that's about it.

At the end of the day, it wasn't worth spending the initial effort to build
against that. I intend on doing this in the future, but for now I'm willing to
accept the risk of having an incorrect redirect count and get it out to more
people in the meantime.

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fencepost
Be VERY careful with this - it may end up hurting the charities you want to
help. If Amazon dislikes this they may not be able to do anything to you (or
to get you to stop it) but they may be able to shut down charities that are
receiving money because of you. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find
language in the affiliate agreements that bars this kind of thing and kills
accounts of charities that use it.

~~~
atwebb
I've made a few comments but you're at the top currently so I'll piggy back:

To OP, in the words of Hank Williams "I've been down that road before..."

I wrote a FF extension for our site that did something (I'm guessing similar),
look at the site, and do the appropriate redirect with some ids and what not
so i could track the charity for CJ/LinkShare/Amazon/whatever flavor. Theicon
would turn green if you were affiliate shopping and I was taking redirects
from Slickdeals and sites like it and making them my own transparently. You
may have a newer, better method that gets around agreements sites make but
from my experience, the affiliate houses (and retailers) much prefer actual
driven traffic to a scraper like mine (and maybe yours). In retrospect, I can
see that it was essentially a leach. I wasn't really encouraging many people
to do shopping they otherwise wouldn't have done (well that would be the
retailers point I guess). If I had any influence it was only marginal and I
was taking revenue directly from direct traffic sites which, most likely,
weren't happy and might not continue to drive traffic to certain retailers if
commissions went down by a noticeable margin (or link jacking was allowed in
the TOS).

I haven't read your code, I'm purely guessing as to what it does, so if I'm
offbase let me know and I'd be very interested in your approach).

EDIT: After finishing that novel, I actually looked at the site. Does it just
redirect any link to Amazon? I was expecting some link-jacking and ID
insertion, so maybe nevermind. Mine was charity based as well (similar to
Goodshop) but a bit more aggressive (in the charity's favor) which is where I
believe the downfall to be.

~~~
stp-ip
Still I think @atwebb is right and as
[http://socialvest.us](http://socialvest.us) and
[http://aflattr.com](http://aflattr.com) were already shutdown Amazon is just
not that happy with someone taking their revenue to charities. If it's just
redirecting to smile.amazon.com it could be alright as it's the "sane" revenue
share of only 0.5% and Amazon is promoting it itself, but still the automatic
redirect will perhaps let them kill it.

------
swah
But then... why doesn't Amazon always donate? Free PR it seems.

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dmnd
Is it really necessary for this extension to "access your data on all
websites" and "access your tabs and browsing activity"? That's asking a lot.

Shouldn't it only need to access amazon.com? E.g. once it detects my browser
is on amazon.com, just redirect to smile.amazon.com. What else does it need to
do?

~~~
shwinnabego
Pretty sure chrome requires all extensions to state that. It's not that the
application needs to, but in the event that it does, chrome wants a catch-all
phrase.

~~~
dmnd
That's not true. Look at the first example in the docs:
[http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/permission_warnings.h...](http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/permission_warnings.html)

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nathantotten
I understand this is for a good cause, but isn't this just stealing money from
Amazon? You are exploiting a program that is designed to encourage additional
sales, not give money away from any random Amazon transaction.

~~~
bmelton
No, it's not stealing from Amazon. They offer the referral system as a service
to those who wish to refer people. It's a relic of their 'growth-hacking'
days. If they thought it was stealing, they'd simply discontinue the service.
It's easy to argue that they don't need it anymore.

But, as someone who's looked into the legality of this (I was building
something very similar, but with a narrower charity set than the OP's), it
_is_ against their terms of service.

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josephjrobison
Just out of curiosity - if a charity has an affiliate account, won't they get
like 4%+ of the purchase? ([https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/land...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/landing/referralfees.html))

This chrome extension is really cool, and good for just forgetting to use
charity affiliate links, but if your charity has an affiliate account that's
the best way to do it right?

~~~
stp-ip
4-10% actually. And there were projects actually using these percentages to
donate to good causes, till Amazon burned them and copied the idea to make it
more financially positive for them 4-10% vs 0.5%.

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ZanderEarth32
Neat idea. I did something similar except it was meant to support your
favorite podcasts or websites through Amazon Affiliate sales and I didn't
build a plugin, I used an existing one in a different way.

[http://tortillasinbed.com/post/60098833373/spreading-the-
lov...](http://tortillasinbed.com/post/60098833373/spreading-the-love)

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PStamatiou
Reminds me of Daniel Gross's first product (before Greplin/Cue)
[http://www.lostinmobile.com/home/daniel-gross-and-
greplin.ht...](http://www.lostinmobile.com/home/daniel-gross-and-greplin.html)

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BriBriCooper
I do love the idea of this. Even immediately downloaded it to my torch
browser, but I did want some input before actually using it. Seems like there
is some hesitation. How safe is this? And will it be bad for Amazon or the
charities involved?

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dgorges
I tried your extension but it caused Chrome to get stuck in an infinite
redirection loop.

I used the eBook link to amazon.com on this page:
[http://37signals.com/remote/](http://37signals.com/remote/)

~~~
jschlatter
I made a very similar extension last week
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/always-
smile/fpaap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/always-
smile/fpaapignoneonaghhkoddkghglbppdmg)) and encountered this issue, too. You
can resolve it by going to [http://smile.amazon.com](http://smile.amazon.com)
and choosing your charity. After that, the extension should work as expected.

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ancarda
I hadn't heard of Amazon Smile until now. Why doesn't Amazon do this for every
transaction? Would it hurt business to give 0.5% to charities automatically?

~~~
giarc
Amazon already operates at very small margins
([http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin](http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin)),
so any amount given to charity hurts the bottom line.

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MichaelTieso
I'm guessing this affects affiliate redirects, right?

~~~
jhaimson
Yes, this will also redirect affiliate links

~~~
stp-ip
I don't want to discourage you, but socialvest.us and aflattr.com both did
redirect via affiliate links and were burned from Amazon.

~~~
fudged71
And it absolutely makes sense.

Amazon isn't just giving out free money. Affiliates are meant to drive traffic
to the Amazon website. This service doesn't seem to do that.

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3rd3
How about a browser extension that tries to find local/national alternatives
to Amazon while viewing articles on Amazon?

~~~
patd
You can give my extension a try :
[http://www.shoptimate.com](http://www.shoptimate.com)

