We’re Not Trying to Beat Amazon. We’re Building What Amazon Couldn’t.

One of the most predictable questions investors ask about GivMoo is some version of this: “How are you going to compete with Amazon?” My answer is simple. We are not trying to become Amazon.

Amazon has built one of the most powerful commerce systems in the world around selection, speed, convenience, scale, and shareholder value. GivMoo is being built around a different economic idea: commerce can still work as commerce while intentionally sharing a meaningful portion of the value created with nonprofits. That is not a small distinction. It changes what kind of company we are building, who we are building it for, and what market we actually need to win.

Amazon Already Tried Cause-Based Shopping

AmazonSmile is worth talking about because it proved something important. Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile allowed customers to shop essentially the same Amazon experience while Amazon donated 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to a charity selected by the customer. Amazon eventually reported hundreds of millions of dollars in donations through the program… then Amazon shut it down.

In January 2023, Amazon announced that AmazonSmile would close the following month. Amazon explained that after nearly a decade, the program had not created the level of impact the company originally hoped for and that, with more than one million eligible organizations globally, the impact was spread too thin. In fact, I would not describe AmazonSmile as a bad idea; I think it was a good idea attached to a business model that was never fundamentally built around nonprofit funding.

It would be unreasonable to assume a public company operating at Amazon’s scale could simply redirect 20% of merchandise sales to nonprofits without fundamentally changing its economics. Amazon has shareholders, margin expectations, enormous infrastructure costs, and a business model built for a very different purpose. GivMoo does not have to retrofit impact onto somebody else’s model because impact is part of ours from the beginning.

We Do Not Need Every Purchase

This is also where I think the Amazon comparison can distract investors from the actual opportunity. GivMoo does not need to replace Amazon. We do not need to replace Walmart, Target, Etsy, or every other place Americans shop online and, we certainly do not need one percent, five percent, or ten percent of all U.S. e-commerce before the company becomes meaningful.

What we need is a specific purchase moment because a shopper needs three things to happen:

• They have flexibility about where they make the purchase.
• GivMoo has a product that meets the need at a price and quality they accept.
• They would prefer that the transaction also benefit an organization or cause they care about.

That is our initial market position. If someone needs an obscure replacement part delivered tomorrow morning and Amazon has it, I am not pretending GivMoo needs to win that transaction. But consider a shopper buying a gift, pet product, household item, shirt, accessory, school supply, personal-care product, or another everyday item where there are already dozens of acceptable choices, that is a very different decision.

If the shopper can get something they genuinely want and know that 20% or more of the purchase is supporting a nonprofit, then we have given that customer a reason to choose differently. We do not have to win every transaction we simply have to win enough of the transactions where choice still exists.

A Much Smaller Market Requirement with Bigger Impact

This is important for investors because early-stage companies can get themselves into trouble by defining their opportunity too broadly. Let me cover a few things of importance on this topic:

• U.S. e-commerce sales totaled approximately $1.23 trillion in 2025. That is a remarkable number, but GivMoo should not pretend the entire $1.23 trillion is immediately addressable.
• Our opportunity begins with a small fraction of it; specifically with the ethical consumer.
• If just 1% of 2025 online commerce moved through a model where 20% of sales went to nonprofits, that would represent roughly $2.47 billion in nonprofit funding.

The point is not that GivMoo is forecasting that result, the point is scale. A company can become economically significant while capturing a very small share of a very large existing behavior because ee do not need to create online shopping, we do not need to teach Americans how to buy products on the internet, and we do not need to convince every shopper to care about every cause. Instead, we need to earn a small share of purchases from people who already care.

The Goal Is Not to Be Amazon With a Donation Button

That would be the wrong ambition and I assure you I say that with enough conviction to sink a large ship. The opportunity is to build something Amazon cannot easily become without changing what Amazon is.

GivMoo can make nonprofit participation part of the transaction economics rather than an optional program layered on top of them and that does not automatically make us successful. We still have to prove that customers come back. We have to offer products people actually want. We have to compete on service, value, trust, and convenience. And we have to show that our economics remain sustainable while sharing meaningful revenue with nonprofits.

Those are real challenges and none of them require us to beat Amazon. They require us to become very good at serving a particular customer making a particular kind of purchasing decision. Amazon proved that people liked the idea of connecting shopping with causes. AmazonSmile also demonstrated the limitations of trying to bolt that idea onto a company whose underlying economics were designed for something else.

GivMoo starts from the opposite direction because we are not asking how little commerce can give away without changing the business – we are asking how to build a profitable business where giving back is part of the commerce itself. That is why we do not need to become Amazon, we will and always will be, GivMoo.