Affiliate disclosure

The short version

Stroke & Stern 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.

If you click a buy link on this site and purchase something, we may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the same whether you arrive at Amazon through us or by typing the address yourself.

Where disclosure appears

Three places, and all three are deliberate:

• Above the first affiliate link on every monetized page. Not buried at the bottom -- the FTC guidance is that a disclosure should be where a reader will actually see it before they act on the link.
• Directly under every buy button, marked #ad, including the buttons that show no price.
• In the footer of every page, and on this page.

Three of the eleven ranking competitors measured during our research ship tagged affiliate links with no detectable disclosure anywhere. That is an FTC exposure and it is not one we are going to replicate.

What commission does not affect

Ranking order. Every page states its ranking criterion before any product appears -- packed linear inches, published weight, rider limit, whichever it is -- and the order follows from that figure.

There is also a structural reason commission cannot bias us in any interesting way right now, and it is worth stating rather than relying on a promise: every product on this site links to Amazon under the same Associates tag (strokeandstern-20). There is no higher-paying merchant to steer you toward. Commission rates vary a little by Amazon product category, but not in a way that maps onto our rankings.

If that changes -- if we join a network with meaningfully different per-merchant rates -- this page will say so before any link on the site does.

What we do not accept

• Paid placement. No brand has paid to appear on this site or to appear higher on a page, and none will.
• Free product. We accept no samples, no loan units and no gifted gear. This is easy for us to promise because we do not test anything, and it also means there is no relationship with a brand to protect.
• Sponsored content. Nothing here is written for or with a manufacturer.

What we do not have

Worth stating on the same page, because it is the other half of the trust question: we have not tested any of the products on this site. We own none of them. What we do instead is written out in full, formulas included.

Prices

Prices on this site are pulled from a live data feed and stamped with the date they were checked. When no live price is available, the button reads "Check price on Amazon" rather than showing a number. There is no path in this site's code to a remembered or estimated price, which is deliberate -- it makes a stale figure impossible rather than merely discouraged.

Amazon prices change frequently. Whatever Amazon shows you at checkout is the price; anything on this page is a snapshot from the date shown beside it.

How the links work

Buy links on this site pass through a redirect at /go/ before reaching the retailer. That exists so a destination can be changed in one place rather than edited across hundreds of pages, and so we can measure which links are useful. It is marked noindex and blocked in robots.txt, and it adds no tracking of you beyond what the retailer does anyway.

Every outbound commercial link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", which is what Google's link-spam policy asks for and what an honest affiliate link should carry.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a specific link or recommendation is compromised, tell us at info@strokeandstern.com or through the contact form. See also our editorial policy and how we rank.