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BuySignal

Affiliate disclosure

Last updated: [DATE]

The short version

Some links on BuySignal are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, the merchant or their affiliate network may pay us a commission. You never pay more because of it — the price is exactly the same as it would be if you had typed the address in yourself.

That commission is how this publication is funded. It does not buy a review, a score, a ranking position or a kind word. Everything below explains, in detail, how that works in practice.

This disclosure is made in the spirit of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 CFR Part 255) and equivalent advertising-disclosure rules elsewhere, which require that a material connection between a publisher and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

What an affiliate link actually is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a merchant with a tracking identifier attached. When you follow it, the merchant's system records that you arrived from BuySignal — usually by storing a cookie in your browser for a set window, commonly between 24 hours and 90 days depending on the programme.

If you buy within that window, the merchant credits the sale to us and pays a percentage of it — or a fixed fee — as commission. If you do not buy, nothing happens and nobody is charged anything. The commission comes out of the merchant's own margin. It is a marketing cost for them, not a surcharge on you.

How to recognise affiliate links on this site

We do not hide them. You can identify an affiliate link on BuySignal in three ways:

  • The redirect. Nearly every commercial outbound link on this site passes through our own redirect first. Hover over a button and the status bar will show an address beginning /go/ followed by a short product slug. That redirect counts the click and then forwards you to the merchant.
  • The rel attribute. Outbound commercial links carry the HTML attributes rel="sponsored nofollow", the machine-readable signal search engines expect on paid or affiliate links.
  • The call-to-action buttons. Prominent buttons such as "Check official price", "View on the official site" or "Get the current offer" are affiliate links unless a page says otherwise.

Plain reference links inside body text — to a company's documentation, a news report, a standards body or another page on this site — are ordinary links and earn us nothing.

You never pay more

We want to be blunt about this because it is the question readers most often ask.

  • The price you see on the merchant's site is the same price you would see arriving from anywhere else.
  • We do not add a fee, a markup or a surcharge of any kind.
  • Where a merchant offers a genuine discount to our readers, that discount is lower than the standard price, never higher, and the page will say so plainly.
  • We never claim a discount is expiring when it is not.

Networks and programmes we participate in

BuySignal participates in affiliate programmes operated by, among others:

  • ClickBank
  • Digistore24
  • JVZoo
  • WarriorPlus
  • Impact (and the individual merchant programmes hosted on it)
  • Amazon Associates

We may also work directly with individual merchants outside these networks, and we may join or leave programmes over time. Participation in a network does not mean the network has reviewed, endorsed or approved anything we publish, and it does not mean a merchant endorses us.

Amazon Associates

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

BuySignal 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 and affiliated sites. Amazon prices and availability are accurate as of the date and time shown on the relevant page and are subject to change; the price displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase is the price that applies. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

What commissions do and do not influence

Commissions do not influence:

  • Which products we choose to cover.
  • What we conclude about a product.
  • The editor score, where one is assigned.
  • The order of products in a comparison, a ranking or a buying guide.
  • Whether criticism stays on the page after a merchant objects.

Commissions do fund:

  • The hours spent researching, buying, testing and writing.
  • Hosting, tooling, images and the upkeep of the site.
  • The re-verification passes that keep prices and feature lists current.

Nobody at BuySignal is paid a bonus tied to the revenue of a specific review, and commission rates are not visible in the editorial workflow when a verdict is being written. That firewall is described in the editorial policy.

How products are selected

Products are chosen editorially — by reader demand, category relevance, and whether we can obtain enough reliable information to write something honest. Where a product has an affiliate programme, we usually join it, because that is how the work is funded. But the sequence matters: we decide to cover a product, and then look at whether a programme exists — not the other way round.

Companies cannot buy their way onto this site, and a company declining to run an affiliate programme does not keep it off.

Products that pay us nothing

Some things we cover earn us nothing at all, and we cover them anyway:

  • Free and open-source alternatives, which frequently appear in our "alternatives" sections and sometimes win outright.
  • Products with no affiliate programme, where linking directly is simply the useful thing to do.
  • Products we advise you not to buy. A negative review earns close to nothing, and we publish them regularly.
  • Products whose programme we have declined or left, usually because the merchant's refund handling or marketing conduct did not meet a standard we are comfortable sending readers toward.

If the honest answer to "which should I buy?" is "none of these, save your money", that is the answer we publish.

When a relationship changes

Affiliate relationships are not permanent. A programme may close, a merchant may terminate a partnership, commission terms may change, or we may withdraw. When that happens:

  • We update the affected pages during our normal re-verification pass.
  • We do not delete a critical review because a merchant ended a relationship over it.
  • We do not add positive coverage because a new, better-paying programme became available.
  • If a change is material to how you should read a page, the page will say so.

Because relationships change and pages are updated at different times, this disclosure is written to cover the general case. If a specific page ever appears to conflict with what is stated here, this page governs and we would like to hear about the discrepancy.

Questions

If you want to know whether one particular link on this site is an affiliate link, or which network a product is sold through, just ask — we will tell you directly. Write to us via the contact page.

For how we handle the anonymous click data behind the /go/ redirect, see our privacy policy. For the editorial standards behind every verdict, see our editorial policy.

This page is a template supplied with the site software. It is general information, not legal advice. Before you rely on it, complete every bracketed placeholder and have the finished text reviewed by a qualified lawyer or compliance professional in your jurisdiction.