Affiliate disclosure

The plain statement

The Dram Desk 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. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

In practice: most of the buy buttons on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise - the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket.

How to spot them

Every affiliate link on this site is marked #ad directly underneath it, with a link back to this page. They also carry rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup, which is how search engines are told the link is commercial.

Affiliate links route through /go/ on this domain before redirecting to the retailer. That is so we can change where a link points - if we join a different affiliate program later, for example - without rewriting the article around it. It is not there to hide anything, and the destination is always the retailer named on the button.

What commission does not do

This is the part that actually matters, so it is worth being specific.

• It does not decide which products appear. Products are selected on fitness for the reader and on what the maker publishes - the full method is here.
• It does not decide the order. Higher-commission products are not ranked higher. Commission rate is not an input to the ranking at any stage.
• It does not soften what we say. Every product on this site carries a stated drawback, including the ones we rank first.
• It does not stop us telling you not to buy. Our whiskey stones verdict says most people should buy something else - and then links the cheaper alternative, which pays us less.

Things we do not do

• No sponsored placements. Nobody has paid to appear on this site and nobody can.
• No free products. We have not accepted any, which is straightforward because we do not test products at all.
• No paid reviews or gifted placements.
• No affiliate links to programs we have not joined. Every commercial link here goes to Amazon, because Amazon is the only program this site is a member of.

Prices

Prices on this site come from a live data layer and are stamped with the date they were checked. We never type a price into an article, because a typed price is accurate on the day of publication and misleading every day after that.

Where the live feed has nothing current for a product, the button reads Check price on Amazon rather than showing you a stale figure. Prices at the retailer change constantly and the price you see at checkout is the one that counts.

Why we tell you all this

Because the Federal Trade Commission requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections between a publisher and the products it recommends, and because a reader who does not know how a site is funded cannot properly weigh what it says.

The honest position is that affiliate revenue creates an incentive to recommend purchases. We manage that by publishing the selection method, putting a drawback on every pick, and being willing to point readers at the cheaper option - our editorial policy covers the rest.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, write to info@thedramdesk.com or use the contact form.