Affiliate disclosure

The short version

Shaker & Sphere earns a commission when you buy something through one of our links. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway. That commission is the only way this site is funded. No brand pays to appear here.

Amazon Associates

Shaker & Sphere is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Our Amazon tracking tag is shakerandsphere-20. It is appended to the links that leave this site for Amazon, which is how Amazon knows a purchase originated here. It carries no information about you.

Amazon is currently the only retailer we have an affiliate relationship with. If that changes we will name the network here before any such link is published.

What a commission actually is

It is a share of the retailer’s own margin, paid to us for sending a customer. It is not a markup: the price you see is Amazon’s price, identical to what you would pay arriving there any other way. Nothing you buy through this site costs more because you came through it.

Commissions are paid on a percentage of the sale, which means we earn more when you spend more. That is a real conflict of interest and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest move, so the section below is how it is contained.

What the money does not buy

• Zero payments have been accepted for placement. No brand has paid to be included, ranked, or mentioned on this site, and none has been offered the opportunity.
• No free products. We have not been sent samples, and we have not accepted any. It follows that we have not tested anything — what we do instead is published in full.
• Commission rate is never an input to a ranking. Several picks on this site are the cheaper of two options, recommended over the more profitable one because the published specifications say so.
• No brand sees a page before it is published, and no brand has ever had a page changed on request.

How to spot an affiliate link here

Three ways, and we use all three:

• A plain-language disclosure appears above the first affiliate link on every page that has one — not just down here in the footer.
• Every buy button is labeled #ad directly beneath it.
• Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", the technical marker search engines read as “this link is a paid relationship”.

Links that are not commercial — a manufacturer’s spec sheet, a product manual, a standards body — carry none of these markers and earn us nothing. They are there so you can check our numbers.

About the prices you see

Prices are read from the retailer and stamped with the date they were checked. If a price is more than 48 hours old we hide it rather than show a stale number, which is why buttons sometimes read “check price on Amazon” instead. We would rather show you nothing than show you a price that has moved.

Retail prices change constantly and without notice. The price on the retailer’s page at the moment you buy is the price that applies, always.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a link is not disclosed properly, email info@shakerandsphere.com or use the contact form. The editorial policy covers the rest of how the site is run.