Affiliate Disclosure

The required statement

Skim & Soak 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. The price you pay is identical whether you use our link or go to Amazon directly - the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your pocket.

How to tell which links earn us money

You do not have to guess. Every earning link on this site is marked and behaves the same way:

• It carries #ad directly underneath it, on every single button, including the ones with no price attached.
• It carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" in the HTML, which is the standard machine-readable marking.
• It goes through /go/ on our own domain before reaching the retailer. Internal links to our own pages never do.
• Every commercial page carries a disclosure notice above the first buy link, not buried at the bottom.

Who we currently earn from

One retailer. Amazon. That is the complete list, and it is deliberately short: we do not build tracked links for programs we have not actually joined, even where the program exists publicly and the merchant would be a reasonable recommendation.

If that changes, this page changes with it. The destination of every buy link on this site lives in a single configuration file, so switching a retailer is a one-line change that does not touch a word of the editorial copy - which is the structural reason a commercial relationship cannot quietly rewrite a recommendation here.

What the commission does not change

Saying “commission does not influence our picks” is what everyone says, so here are three things you can check rather than take on trust:

• Every product carries a “skip it if” line. All 71 of them, because our content model makes the field mandatory. A site optimizing purely for commission does not build that into its data structure.
• Several roundups include a pick we would not buy, named as such, with the reason. Those entries earn us the same commission as the ones we recommend, and we tell you not to buy them.
• Several pages recommend the cheapest possible answer - a flat net, a bag of baking soda, cutting back a tree branch, testing before you buy anything - over the expensive one. Those pages earn us close to nothing and they are the right advice.

About the prices

Prices on this site come from a live data layer and nowhere else. There is no price typed into any page, and no field in our content model capable of holding one.

When that layer has nothing current for a product, the button reads “Check price on Amazon” rather than showing a number. A price older than 48 hours is treated as unknown and disappears on its own. Where a price does appear, the date it was checked is printed beside it.

Retail prices change constantly. The price on Amazon at the moment you click is the real one, and it is the one that applies.

What we have not been given

No free products. No review units. No sponsored placements. No brand has paid to appear on this site, and none has been offered the opportunity.

We also have not tested any of the products we write about, which is stated plainly on every commercial page and in detail on our methodology page. What we do instead is compile published specifications and compute the arithmetic, with the source cited next to the number.

Why this page exists in this form

United States Federal Trade Commission guidance requires that a material connection between an endorser and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, and that endorsements be truthful and substantiated. A commission on a purchase is exactly such a connection.

That is why the disclosure appears above the first buy link on every commercial page rather than only here, and why the “we have not tested this” statement appears in the same place. A disclosure nobody reaches is not a disclosure.

Questions

Contact us or email info@skimandsoak.com. Our editorial policy covers corrections, independence and update cadence in more detail.