The Buy NoteHow this site earns
This site is funded by affiliate commission. Here is exactly what that means, in the plainest wording we can manage.
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The Buy Note earns commission from affiliate links. When you follow a link from this site to a retailer and buy something, we may be paid a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price either way.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Commission does not decide what appears here. Products are chosen for the guide they belong to. In the Amazon catalogue the description, photograph and price beside one come from Amazon’s own data rather than from us; under Picks the price and picture were entered by us, and each of those pages says so beside the price.
Prices and availability change constantly. A price from Amazon is what Amazon reported on the date printed beside it, and one we entered is a note of what something cost when it was written down. Either way the retailer’s own page is the only accurate source.
The required statement
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That sentence is required word for word by the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement, and it appears in the footer of every page on this site as well as here.
What an affiliate link is
Some links on this site carry a tracking code. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays The Buy Notea small percentage of the sale. You pay the same price you would have paid otherwise; the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your basket.
Every outbound product link here goes through /go/ before it reaches Amazon, and carries rel="sponsored nofollow". That is Google’s required marking for a paid link, and it is applied by the component itself rather than by whoever wrote the page — so it cannot be forgotten on the one link that matters.
What commission does not buy
- It does not decide what gets written up. What does is chosen first; whether it earns anything is not part of that choice, and a product that pays nothing keeps its note exactly as long as it deserves its place.
- It does not take a page down. Nothing is removed because it stopped earning or because a brand asked.
- It does not buy a placement. There are no sponsored posts and no paid positions in any ranking on this site.
- It does not change your price, and it does not tell the retailer anything about you beyond the fact that a click came from this site.
Prices and availability
There are two kinds of page here and they get their prices differently, so each says which it is.
In the Amazon catalogue, a price comes from Amazon’s own product data and carries the moment it was taken. None of those is typed in by hand, and where Amazon has given us nothing the page shows no price at all rather than a guess.
Under Picks it is the reverse: the price and the photograph were entered by us, and every one of those pages says so beside the price. Treat them as a note of what something cost when it was written down, not as a live figure.
Either way — prices and availability may vary, and they move constantly. The Amazon page is the only accurate source and the only one that decides what you pay.
Amazon’s data is never shown for longer than 24 hours, which is the limit the licence sets. Past that the figure is dropped rather than shown stale, so a page with no price means the price could not be refreshed — not that the product is free of one.
What we will not print
No countdowns, no invented scarcity, no best-seller badges and no star ratings or customer reviews borrowed from Amazon. The site has no sales data, no traffic data and no review data, so every one of those would be a fabrication — and Amazon’s review data may only be shown through its API under a licence this site does not use. There is no score here either, and no test behind one: what this site does and does not do is written down.
Questions
Anything unclear about how the site earns is a fair question and gets a straight answer: hello@thebuynote.com.