Popped in on Amazon.com today, and discovered an astonishing thing: Amazon is collecting contributions for presidential candidates. To date, they've collected over $150,000 for John Kerry and over $30,000 for George Bush.
Despite all the work that's been done out there, it's still a complex and expensive thing for candidates to set up online donations - especially small, local candidates. Could it be that Amazon is testing a system that will be rolled out for small campaigns in 2005 or 2006?
The Amazon customer base is huge, their audience trusts them to do secure transactions, and their fees are low. If they rolled this out widely, it could be an earthquake in online political fundraising. (Their fees are 2.5% plus 25 cents. So, they've probably made $5-6000 in fees - which they're donating to KidsVoting USA.)
Posted on May 17, 2004 in money | See full archives
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