Charity

Thank you for your interest in the IttyBiz charity campaign. Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions:

What charity are you giving the money to?

Good question, but one I’m not allowed to answer.

According to Amazon’s Terms of Service:

“Associates may donate their earnings to a charity, but may not announce to their visitors in any way that a portion or all of the proceeds will go to a particular charity.”

Please feel free to email us if you have any questions not answered in this FAQ.

I don’t get it. How does this work?

Amazon has a program called Amazon Associates. When you click on an Amazon link through any webpage, the owner of that webpage makes a commission, generally between four and six percent of the purchase price, although sometimes the commission is as high as 20 percent. Instead of paying the overhead to have stores and customer service reps and whatever else brick-and-mortar stores have to pay, Amazon pays their associates. IttyBiz is an associate, and we’re donating our proceeds to charity.

Why doesn’t it cost more if you’re giving so much to charity?

Amazon uses two main methods to get people to buy from their site. The first method is to rely on people typing “www.amazon.com” in their browser’s address bar (or Google, or whatever). The second method is to rely on referrals from other websites (like IttyBiz) directing people to their site. This is the associate program I mentioned above. Although Amazon pays a referral fee, they have decided to eat this cost and therefore your $20 item or $200 item on the main Amazon page still remains $20 or $200. However, because Amazon then pays IttyBiz the referral fee, we can then turn around and give this money to charity.

Why did you choose an American charity even though you’re Canadian?

We chose an American charity because the vast majority of our readers are American. Canadians, or people from anywhere else in the world, are unlikely to buy from Amazon.com. We want to give as many people as possible the chance to be involved. Most of the people we know, as well as the people they know, are US residents.

I don’t live in the US. Or I don’t shop. Or I don’t read. How else can I help?

You can donate directly to the charity of your choice. If you live somewhere other than the US and you don’t know a good charity to donate to, please go to Google and type in your country’s name and the word “charity”, removing the quotation marks.

Members of the press: If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Naomi at naomi@ittybiz.com.

Thank you for your help. We really appreciate it.

By Naomi Dunford