Don't buy anything during Prime Day until you set up this charitable feature

Don't buy anything during Prime Day until you set up this charitable feature

(Image credit: Amazon)

With spending set to soar during Prime Day 2022, there's one feature we strongly encourage everyone activates on their Amazon acccount before the retailer's yearly sale. It takes no time to set up and means that a portion of the money you spend during Prime Day is diverted to charities in need.

The feature in question is Amazon Smile. How it works is simple, really. Once enabled on your account, Amazon donates 0.5% of your eligible purchases to your chosen charity. There's no recurring payments, no additional costs and no extra effort required on your part - it all happens automatically when you shop.

There are over one million local and national charities to choose from in the US (and thousands in the UK). All are listed on the Amazon Smile site with information on their overall mission, as well as the specific programmes that your money will be put towards, so you have full control over where your donations go.

To set it up right now, just follow these quick steps below:

How to set up Amazon Smile

• Visit smile.amazon.com (opens in new tab) or smile.amazon.co.uk (opens in new tab)
• Log in to your Amazon account
• Select who you want to support from the list of charities
• Every 0.5% from eligible purchases will now go to your chosen charity

In order to make sure donations are taken every time you shop, you do need to always use the smile.amazon.com (opens in new tab) or smile.amazon.co.uk (opens in new tab) URL for each visit. You can bookmark this page to save you needing to enter it each time. It's exactly the same as the standard Amazon site – with the same appearance, products and deals – so don't miss out on anything by shopping this way.

If you shop using the app, you can navigate to the settings tab in the main menu at the bottom right of the screen, tap on the AmazonSmile section and then follow the instructions to activate it on your device.

And that's it. Even though 0.5% of transactions may not sound like a lot on an individual scale, collectively there's the potential to send a whole lot of money to charities with very minimal effort. The Amazon Smile dashboard updates regularly with your own personal contributions and the total money sent to your charity. If you look at the total figures so far, too, a whopping $355 million has already been donated to charities in the US through the program (that's matched by over £300 million in the UK).

Previous estimates show that over $11 billion was spent worldwide during the two days of the last Amazon Prime Day, according to Adobe Analytics (opens in new tab). That does count for all online spending during that period, though. Still, if we consider that a significant portion of that was spent at Amazon – with more than 250 million items sold at the retailer – the potential money for charity is huge by changing one simple purchasing habit and activating Amazon Smile.

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