A little good press goes a long way for a company like Amazon. The company routinely gets knocked for things like warehouse conditions, tax breaks and impact on smaller retail outlets. AmazonSmile’s helped to counteract that a bit, raising money for legitimately good causes, skimmed off purchases from the site.
The online retail giant announced this morning that it’s made $100 million in charitable donations through the program, since launching almost exactly five years ago.
Amazon hasn’t broken down how much each participating charity has raised through the campaign, only that “hundreds of thousands of charities have been able to expand their meaningful work thanks to the donations they’ve received through AmazonSmile,” according to Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer, Jeff Wilke.
Amazon’s also pumping up the incentives for this week. Purchases between now and November 2 will quality for a donation of five-percent of eligible products. That’s apparently around 10 times the normal donation rate, according to the company.
The are currently north of one million charities to chose from.