Amazon has announced plans to close its main donations tool, which has raised nearly £20m for UK charities in the past decade.
The firm said that AmazonSmile, which is used by thousands of charities, will close in a month.
In a statement online, Amazon said the programme “had not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped”.
Through AmazonSmile, the business donates 0.5 per cent of the cost of some purchases to the charity chosen by the consumer.
The scheme “represents a very small portion of the total charitable contributions made through our other programmes, which we estimate at more than £100m in 2021”, the company said.
It also pledged to make a one-off donation to each charity registered with AmazonSmile “equivalent to six months of what they earned through the programme in 2022”. Charities will be able to continue fundraising through AmazonSmile until 20 February.
Amazon also pointed out that charities can register to use its new Charity Store, through which voluntary organisations sell their goods online and keep all of the proceeds from sales.
Only four very large charities use the store so far: Macmillan Cancer Support, Marie Curie, the Natural History Museum and the Royal British Legion.