givesby

givesby
Reminders on Amazon
Reminders on other online shops supported by partners
Customization settings

Inspiration

On many occasions we've placed an Amazon order only to realize we forgot to use Amazon Smile. With almost $200 billion in sales per year on Amazon, universal use of Amazon Smile, which donates 0.5% of sales to a charity of your choice, would enable up to $1 billion in seamless contributes to worthy organizations. However, this is largely untapped - donations through Amazon Smile have averaged only $27 million annually in the last few years.

In fact, Amazon has been criticized for actually making it more difficult to use Amazon Smile, by having two different sites instead of one, not supporting it on mobile, etc. Our project aims to change this.

What it does

givesby seamlessly integrates with your browser experience, giving you reminders to shop more ethically. When you're browsing on amazon.com, givesby will remind you to switch to smile.amazon.com. In addition, when browsing on 10k+ sites partnered with Altruisto, Giving Assistant, and Goodshop, givesby will remind you to use their applicable extensions and coupon codes to support worthy causes. It incentivizes you by displaying an estimate of how much money could be donated based on product prices on the page. You can also customize settings to decide which partners to get notifications for.

How we built it

givesby is a Chrome Extension written in JavaScript. givesby does a URL check against a list of 10k+ web-scraped participating online retailers to remind you to maximize your possible charitable contributions.

Challenges we ran into

Minimal JavaScript and Web Development experience
Aggregating other retailer information
Supporting a seamless user experience

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Final UI Design
Small, non-intrusive behavior
Scraping for a large list of retailers

What we learned

Teamwork makes the dream work
Chrome extension capabilities and limitations

What's next for givesby

givesby is almost ready for the Chrome Store! We want to support more similar extensions and coupon partners in order to maximize our impact. In addition, we would like to reduce the footprint of our extension on a user's browsing behavior by creating session-based display logic and giving more configuration options.

We would also like to calculate total donation count in order to give users a sense of their charitable impact.