Affiliate disclosure

The short version

Shift & Sole 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.

If you click a product link on this site and buy something, we receive a small commission from Amazon. It costs you nothing extra — the price you pay is the same as it would be if you had gone to Amazon directly.

Which tag we use

Every Amazon link on this site carries the Associates tracking ID jr-shiftsole-20. That is this site’s own tag and it is defined in exactly one place in the codebase, so there is no page where a link quietly carries a different one.

Why our links go through /go first

Product links on this site point at /go/amazon on our own domain, which immediately redirects you to Amazon with the tracking parameter attached. Three reasons:

• It keeps the tag in one place. The tracking ID is applied server-side at click time rather than being typed into hundreds of links, which is how sites end up with half their links untagged.
• It lets destinations change without rewriting pages. Right now our links go to a tagged Amazon search for the product, because we do not hold verified product IDs for this site. When we do, they will point at the product page directly - and nothing on any page has to change.
• It is a temporary redirect, not a permanent one. A permanent redirect would get cached by your browser, which would eventually send clicks to the wrong place.

The /go path is excluded from search engines in our robots.txt and sends a noindex header, because it is a redirector rather than a page.

Why we print no prices

Every price element on this site reads “Check price on Amazon” rather than showing a number. That is deliberate: we hold no live price data for this site, and Amazon’s own program terms require displayed prices to come from their API, be timestamped, and be refreshed or removed within roughly 24 hours. Rather than print a number we cannot keep honest, we send you to the current one.

If live price data is ever available to this site, prices will appear with the date they were checked, and they will disappear on their own if that date goes stale. The machinery for that is already built; the data is not there yet.

What commission does not change

• It does not decide the picks. Where the cheaper option is the better one for the reader, we say so, including when it earns us less.
• It does not decide the order. Nothing ranks higher for paying more.
• No brand can pay for placement, and no brand sees our copy before it publishes.
• It does not soften the negative case. Every pick on this site carries a “who should skip it” line, and those exist precisely because an affiliate site has an incentive not to write them.

Which retailers we earn from

Amazon only, currently. We are not part of any other retailer’s or manufacturer’s affiliate program at the moment, which means every manufacturer link on this site - the ones we use to cite specifications - earns us nothing. We would rather state that plainly than imply a breadth of partnerships we do not have.

Links to manufacturer spec pages are ordinary citation links. They carry rel="nofollow" and are never routed through our redirector, because a citation is not a money link.

How our money links are marked

Every commercial link on this site carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", opens in a new tab, and sits under an #ad label with a link back to this page. Every page that contains a buy link also carries a visible disclosure above the first one — not only in the footer, and not only here.

Questions

Shift & Sole is published by Selena Hann. If anything about how this site is funded is unclear, ask: contact@shiftandsole.com or the contact form. See also how we pick and our editorial policy.