Editorial policy
What we will and will not publish, how we correct mistakes, and what protects a ranking from the commission attached to it.
How picks are chosen
Recommendations come from manufacturer-published specifications, reproducible arithmetic on those specifications, and current retail availability. The full method, including every formula, is on how we pick. Nothing on this site is based on hands-on testing, because we have not done any and will not claim to have.
A pick changes when one of four things happens:
- The product is discontinued or goes persistently out of stock.
- A published specification changes, which changes the arithmetic.
- A better answer to the same question becomes available.
- A reader shows us we were wrong.
A pick does not change because a commission rate changed, because a brand asked, or because a more expensive option would earn more.
Corrections
We will get things wrong. Specifications get revised, products get quietly changed, and arithmetic can be miscopied. When that happens:
- Tell us. Email info@shakerandsphere.com or use the contact form. Point us at the page and, if you can, the source that contradicts it.
- We check it against the manufacturer’s published source— the same source cited at the bottom of the page.
- We correct the page and note the correction on it, with a date. We do not quietly edit a claim out of existence. If a factual error affected a ranking, the note says so.
Corrections are not a reputational problem for a site built on checkable numbers. They are the mechanism working.
Update cadence
| Frequency | What happens | |
|---|---|---|
| Prices | Daily | Re-verified against the retailer. A price older than 48 hours is hidden rather than shown stale. |
| Availability | Daily | A product that stops being sold is replaced, not left up. |
| Specifications and picks | Rolling, and on any trigger above | Re-read against the manufacturer's current published source. |
| Seasonal guides | Annually, before the season | Gift guides tied to a holiday are re-checked before that holiday, not after. |
What the “last updated” date means
It means a human changed the substance of the page: a pick, a specification, a calculation, or the advice. It is not bumped by the daily price refresh, even though that refresh rebuilds the site.
This is a deliberate restraint. A site that stamps every page as updated every day is telling you and every search engine that nothing on it can be trusted as a freshness signal. We would rather the date mean something.
Commercial relationships
Shaker & Sphere earns affiliate commissions on purchases made through its links. That is disclosed on every page carrying such a link, above the link itself, and in full on the affiliate disclosure.
Three things follow from it, and they are enforced structurally:
- No advertiser can buy a position. There is no bidding mechanism to buy one with. Outbound links resolve through a fixed redirect that reads a configuration file; it has no notion of a paying customer.
- Commission rate is not an input to any ranking. Where the cheaper product is the better answer, it is the pick — and on this site it often is.
- Nothing is included in exchange for anything. No payments have been accepted for placement, no free products have been accepted, and no brand has reviewed a page before publication.
What we will not publish
- Testing claims we have not earned. No “in our testing”, no “we tried twenty”, no invented test lab.
- Star ratings or review counts. Our data source supplies none, so publishing one would mean inventing it. Nothing on this site carries review markup.
- Prices we cannot verify today. If the live check fails, the page shows no number and the button sends you to the listing instead.
- Credentials the author does not hold, and no fabricated testimonials, quotes or endorsements of any kind.
- Manufactured urgency. No countdown timers, no invented scarcity, no “price rising soon”.
Sources
Every product specification cites its source — a manufacturer listing, product manual or spec sheet — linked where a stable public URL exists. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing for a given figure, the figure is omitted rather than estimated, and the page says which one is missing.