Amazon Smile (aka AmazonSmile at smile.amazon.com) lets Amazon shoppers give 0.5 percent of their purchases value to a charity of their choice. If you do a lot of shopping on Amazon.com, the funds can add up, but Amazon does not make it easy for people to give away their money.
The e-commerce company, for one, chooses to not provide a simple button to convert any regular Amazon product page into an Amazon Smile (AmazonSmile :-)) product page on the fly. It instead pops up a generic note upon entering the site that you can switch to smile.amazon.com to ensure your donations flow to the organization you chose. There is no persistent and easy-to-use button to switch a shopper into AmazonSmile mode.
I find that cumbersome. I want to type “amazon.com,” not “smile.amazon.com,” and I want it to be easy to switch to smile.amazon.com without losing the product page I’m on while using Google Chrome. In particular, I wanted a way to quickly convert any page on Amazon.com to the Amazon Smile (AmazonSmile) version with a click. It’s not hard — just replace the “www” of a product page’s URL with “smile” — but the super-long URLs make it a goofy process when clicking around in the tiny URL field in a browser. Here’s an example of a regular and AmazonSmile URL:
- Regular Amazon URL: https://www.amazon.com/AeroGarden-Harvest-Elite-360-Stainless/dp/B08LZTL61T
- AmazonSmile URL: https://smile.amazon.com/AeroGarden-Harvest-Elite-360-Stainless/dp/B08LZTL61T<
My solution is a bookmarklet, a tiny bit of JavaScript code that you use instead of a regular URL in a browser bookmark. To put my AmazonSmile bookmarklet to use in Google Chrome (it failed to work for Firefox and Safari), follow these steps:
- Create a new bookmark in Google Chrome. Name it whatever makes sense to you in the “name” field (mine is “smile-amazon”). In the “URL” field, paste in this code:
javascript:(function(){let baseURL = window.location.href; let newbaseURL = baseURL.substring(12); let revisedURL = 'https://smile.' + newbaseURL; window.open(revisedURL)})();
- Go to a product page,such as the one above: https://www.amazon.com/AeroGarden-Harvest-Elite-360-Stainless/dp/B08LZTL61T
- Click on the bookmark you just made. A new window will open with the AmazonSmile version of the URL. In this case, that would be: https://smile.amazon.com/AeroGarden-Harvest-Elite-360-Stainless/dp/B08LZTL61T
That’s all there is to it. Generosity simplified. Enjoy.