How we make money
The commercial model in plain terms, including what advertisers cannot buy.
Selectopicks is free to read and nobody pays us a subscription. The site is funded by affiliate commissions, so it is only fair that you know exactly how that works before you trust a ranking.
The short version
When you click a "Visit Site" button and go on to buy something, the brand usually pays us a fee. You pay the same price either way. The fee does not change the score, it does not change the order of the list, and it does not buy a brand a place on the page.
What a commission does not buy
These are commitments, not marketing lines, and you can hold us to them:
- Rank is a function of score. The list is sorted by the score our rubric produces. No brand can pay to move up, and no commission rate is an input to the score.
- We rank brands that pay us nothing. If a product deserves a place, it gets one, whether or not an affiliate programme exists for it.
- Advertisers do not see reviews before publication and do not get to approve or amend them.
- Negative findings stay in. If the renewal price doubles, the support is bad, or a regulator has fined the company, that goes in the review of a brand that pays us exactly as it would for one that does not.
- We do not remove a bad review for money. Brands can ask us to correct a factual error, and we will if they are right. That is the whole of it.
How the links work
Every commercial link on the site is labelled and routed through our own /go/ path before it reaches the brand. Those links carry rel="sponsored nofollow" so search engines can identify them as paid, which is both a Google requirement and simply accurate. Redirect pages are set to noindex and are kept out of our sitemap.
You will also see a short disclosure near the top of every page that carries commercial links, and a smaller one next to prices and buttons. That is deliberate: the disclosure should be where you are making the decision, not buried in a footer.
Programmes and networks
We work with brands both directly and through affiliate networks. Networks handle tracking and payment, and set their own compliance rules on top of ours. The programmes we participate in include those run through:
- Impact
- CJ Affiliate
- Awin
- FlexOffers
- ShareASale
- Rakuten Advertising
Individual brand programmes are added and removed over time, so treat this as the current list rather than a permanent one. Where a brand has no programme at all we still cover it, and the "Visit Site" button simply earns nothing.
Prices, and why they move
Prices on this site are the vendor's own advertised rates, recorded on the date shown next to them. Vendors change pricing without notice, promotional rates expire, and renewal rates are often much higher than the first term. We re-check prices on a rolling cycle and show the date we last verified each one, but the vendor's own checkout is always the authority. If you spot a price here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Tracking and cookies
Affiliate links work by setting a cookie that tells the brand which publisher sent you. That is how the commission is attributed. Our cookie policy explains which cookies are involved, who sets them, and how to refuse them. Refusing them costs you nothing, and the site works the same either way.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a specific page fails to live up to it, write to us at hello@selectopicks.com. Complaints about commercial influence go to the editorial desk, not to the commercial side, and we answer them.