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. :)
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...) 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!
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.
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.
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?
Good point, I accidentally left in these excess permissions from when I was first building it. Removing them now and submitting an update, thanks for letting me know!
It probably waits until you hit a site it that's in in their store catalog and redirects with the proper CJ/LS/Amazon link. I wrote something similar for Firefox a few years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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%.
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.
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?
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?
[+] [-] kcorbitt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhaimson|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] jhaimson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fencepost|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atwebb|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] swah|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmnd|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jhaimson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atwebb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shwinnabego|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathantotten|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmelton|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] josephjrobison|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanderEarth32|12 years ago|reply
http://tortillasinbed.com/post/60098833373/spreading-the-lov...
[+] [-] PStamatiou|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BriBriCooper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgorges|12 years ago|reply
I used the eBook link to amazon.com on this page: http://37signals.com/remote/
[+] [-] jschlatter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhaimson|12 years ago|reply
For some reason, it seems to be working fine for me.
[+] [-] ancarda|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelTieso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhaimson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3rd3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patd|12 years ago|reply