You would be forgiven for saying that this is the age of Amazon. With more than 200 million people shopping at least once online in the United States of America and the number growing and not just in the US but elsewhere and not just in the West but in emerging powers such as South Korea, it is a matter of years before e-commerce becomes the norm for the average Tom and Jane. Amazon leads the way and many Amazon terms will become household names and be verbalized. But today a lot of people are pretty confused with some Amazon terms. You hear Amazon Smile, Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Drive, Amazon Business, Amazon Local, Amazon Top Up, etc.
There are so many who looks at the growth of Amazon and cannot resist saying something mean about the fact that Jeff Bezos is growing to be an oligarch even among billionaires. The fact that there are hundreds of shareholders in Amazon should humanize his obscene wealth but hasn’t so much done that.
The fact that his ex-wife who got a small fraction of his wealth is ten times richer than Donald Trump gives me undue joy (I just couldn’t resist this diss). The impact that Amazon’s continual growth has on the pocket of Bezos is not a subject of discussion for me today. Or ever as the case might be. I would rather stick to writing the things that I know, the things that won’t give me agony.
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I will discuss AS sometimes styled AmazonSmile and how it is different from Amazon Prime today. You know, hearing the word Smile may confuse you into thinking Amazon designed it to put a smile on your face. I thought so, too, and it turns out that I wasn’t far from the truth.
Amazon wants to put smiles on the faces of many and they are using the AS to do it. Only shopping at smile.amazon.com supports charity, they said. Basically, when you shop on with Sile via smile.amazon.com, Amazon would donate 0.5 percent of the price to charitable causes.
Amazon assures all that shopping on smile.amazon.com is the same thing as shopping in the traditional Amazon.com with the same features, the same products, the same prices, and the same discounts when applicable. You do not miss out on anything by shopping on AmazonSmile, instead, people living in poverty and all kinds of disadvantages.
The confusion here is that some people sometimes refer to Amazon Smile as Amazon Smile Prime. Amazon Prime is the membership program of Amazon in which consumers pay a flat 99 dollars per year which affords them free shipping, discounts, same-day delivery in selected US metropolis, ad-free access to millions of songs on Amazon Music and millions of photos on Amazon Photo, among other pecks. Whether you are a Prime subscriber or not, once you come online via smile.amazon.com, you are doing a charitable cause.
So basically, while Amazon Prime puts a smile on the pockets of Amazon, Smile puts a smile on people on their charitable lists — some would say it’s just 0.5 percent but it’s something.
Image source: OnePeterFive