How this is funded
Affiliate disclosure
Plain English: we earn Amazon commission on purchases made through links here, it costs you nothing, and it cannot change what we recommend.
By Mike M.Last updated
The disclosure
Tag & Tether 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.
In ordinary words: most product links on this site go to Amazon. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of what you spent. You pay exactly the price you would have paid if you had typed the product name into Amazon yourself — the commission comes out of Amazon's margin, not out of your pocket.
That is the entire business model of this site. There are no ads, no sponsored content, no paid reviews and no subscription for readers.
How the links work
Every product link on this site routes through our own /go/ address before it reaches the retailer. That is a redirect, not a tracker: it attaches our Amazon Associates identifier so the sale is attributed to us, and it means that if we ever change retailer for a product we can do it in one place rather than editing ninety pages.
Those redirect addresses are marked noindex and blocked in our robots.txt, so they are never crawled or indexed. Every earning link also carries rel="sponsored nofollow", which is what Google's link-spam policy requires of monetized links and which we apply through a single shared component so it cannot be forgotten on one page.
You will also see #ad beside every buy button on the site, plus a short disclosure at the top of every page that contains an affiliate link — above the first link rather than only at the foot of the page, which is what the FTC expects.
Which retailers we earn from
Amazon only, at present. Amazon is the retailer for every product link on this site today.
Some brands in this category run their own affiliate programs through networks like CJ and Awin. We are not members of any that sell trackers, so we build no links to them — a link to a program we have not joined earns nothing and would be dishonest about why it exists. If we join one in future, the link will be marked and this page will name it.
Links to manufacturer support pages and specification pages — the citations in the Sources block at the foot of our pages — are not affiliate links and earn us nothing. They are there because you should be able to check our figures at source.
Why commission does not change a ranking
There is a structural reason here, and we would rather give you that than an assurance about our character.
The things we recommend pay us the least. This site's entire argument is that no-subscription devices are usually the better buy: a $25 Bluetooth tag instead of a $600 collar with a plan, a prepaid OBD unit instead of one billing $12.95 a month. Amazon commission is a percentage of the sale, so every time we talk a reader out of the expensive subscription device we are talking ourselves out of money. A commission-maximizing version of this site would rank things very differently.
We also follow a buyer-first rule on destinations: where a product is sold in more than one place, the link goes to the better option for you on price and availability, not the one that pays more. The full editorial policy is here.
Prices, and what commission has to do with them
Nothing, mechanically. Prices on this site are pulled from Amazon's product API, refreshed daily, and stamped with the date they were checked. They expire automatically after 48 hours, at which point the button reverts to “Check price on Amazon”. We never type a price in by hand, and the price you see at Amazon's checkout is always the one that counts.
One consequence worth stating: because prices change, a product we called the cheapest option last month may not be this month. The live price next to each pick is the current figure; the editorial judgment around it is based on three-year cost of ownership, which moves much more slowly.
Questions
If anything about how this site earns money is unclear, email contact@tagandtether.com and we will answer plainly. Tag & Tether is published by Iron Mako Media.