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Buff & Bead

How we are funded

Affiliate Disclosure

This site earns a commission when you buy through its links. Here is exactly how that works, what it costs you, and what it does not influence.

Last updated 2026-09-08

The short version

Buff & Bead earns a commission when you buy a product through a link on this site. It costs you nothing extra — the price you pay is the same whether you arrive from here or type the product name into Amazon yourself. That commission is the site’s only revenue.

The Amazon Associates statement

Buff & Bead 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.

Amazon is currently the only program we have joined, which is why every buy link on this site goes to Amazon. Our Associates tracking ID is fafbuffandbead-20, applied at the redirect rather than written into page content, so no link on the site can be published without it.

How the links work

Every buy link on this site is a same-domain link of the form /go/<product>. Clicking it hits our own server, which applies the tracking ID and forwards you to the retailer. Three things follow from that arrangement and all three are deliberate:

  • The destination for any product is one field on one record, so if we ever join a better program for a specific product, moving it is a data change and no page copy moves.
  • Every buy link carries rel="sponsored nofollow" and the redirect is excluded from search indexing, which is what search engines ask for.
  • The redirect is a temporary one rather than a permanent one, so it is never cached by your browser and the destination can always be corrected.

What commission does not affect

The order of a ranked page. There is no commission field in the product data and no commission term in the scoring rubric — it is absent rather than weighted at zero, which means there is nothing that could be changed to favor a better-paying product.

Several products on this site are sold direct by manufacturers whose affiliate programs we have not joined, and where one of those is the right answer we name it and state plainly that a click there earns us nothing. Those products exist on the site precisely because they are the test of this policy.

What we do not accept

  • Free products. Nothing on this site was sent to us, because nothing on this site has been tested by us.
  • Sponsored placements or paid position in any ranking.
  • Payment to write, remove or amend a review.
  • Advertising of any kind other than the affiliate links described here.

Where this disclosure appears

In three places, because a disclosure only reachable at a dedicated URL does not meet the FTC’s clear-and-conspicuous standard:

  • Above the first buy link on every page that carries one, in the page header rather than at the foot.
  • Under every individual buy button, as an #ad mark linking back to this page.
  • In the footer of every page on the site, alongside the Amazon Associates statement.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site looks influenced, write to info@buffandbead.com and ask. We will answer, and if the answer reveals a problem we will fix it in public rather than quietly.