This is fantastic!

To save the most lives, select Against Malaria Foundation as your charity. It's the current top recommendation from Givewell (http://www.givewell.org), an excellent charity evaluation organization. They focus on proven cost-effectiveness and transparency.

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: http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF

The first thing I thought when I saw this was awesome!

The second thing I thought was that I'd never remember to use it.

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.

https://github.com/jessepollak/smile

Errr, out of 1 million eligible 501c's how many are "controversial"? as in political shills or fronts for religious nut jobs?

I wonder how Amazon plans to deal with the inevitable "why did you donate to a charity supporting / opposing $ISSUE?

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.

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).

We also have a lot of other merchants signed up.

Previous Discussion (4 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643676

Amazon may be making more 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 http://smile.amazon.com, 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.

A 0.5% effective rebate on everything you purchase on Amazon is better than many bank accounts offer...

Is this forever? Why are we just hearing about this now - and from a mallard?

yup that's also the amount of taxes amazon's paying in europe

This is great news! Keep it up!