Drift & Dime
Affiliate disclosure
We earn a commission when you buy through our links. Here is exactly how that works, what it costs you, and what it does and does not change.
The short version
Drift & Dime 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. We earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you.
Our Amazon Associates tracking ID is driftanddime-20. Every buy link on this site carries it.
What that means in practice
When you click a buy button here, you go through a link on this domain that redirects you to the retailer. That redirect adds our tracking ID. If you then buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale.
You pay exactly the same price as you would going to the retailer directly. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket. There is no surcharge, no markup, and no price difference of any kind.
Amazon’s cookie window is short — typically 24 hours — so we are credited only if you buy fairly promptly after clicking.
Where you will see it disclosed
The FTC requires that affiliate relationships be disclosed clearly and near the links themselves. We do that in three places:
- Above the fold on every page carrying an affiliate link — a disclosure box directly under the headline, before you reach any product.
- Under every single buy button, marked #ad with a link back to this page.
- In the footer of every page on the site, including pages with no affiliate links at all.
Every outbound money link is also marked rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" in the page source, which is how we disclose the relationship to search engines as well as to readers.
We flag this because it is a real failure mode in this category: one of the competitor pages we reviewed while planning this site runs affiliate links in its body copy with no disclosure anywhere on the page. That is a compliance failure and a trust problem, and it is the reason our disclosure sits at the top rather than the bottom.
Which retailers we work with
Amazon, and at the moment only Amazon. Drift & Dime is a new site and has not been approved for any other affiliate program. We say that plainly rather than implying a broader set of relationships than we have.
There are brands and retailers we link to whose programs we have not joined — currently NRS, Austin Kayak (ACK), REI Co-op. Those links are plain, untracked, and earn us nothing. We include them when they are the right place for a reader to go, and we would rather send you somewhere useful for free than only ever point at the retailer that pays us.
If that changes — if we join another program — this page gets updated before any link does.
What commission does not change
This is the part that matters, and a promise is weak evidence, so here is the structural version.
Ranking. Products are scored against four published criteria per category, shown per-criterion on every card. Commission rate is not one of them. See how we pick.
Inclusion. No product appears on this site because someone paid for it to. We accept no sponsored placements and no free samples.
What we say about things. Every product on this site carries a “who should skip it” note naming who should not buy it. Several pages actively tell readers to spend less than they were planning to — buy the cushion rather than the seat, keep the entry paddle, use foam blocks rather than a rack. Those recommendations cost us money, which is the clearest evidence we can offer that the commission is not driving the copy.
Prices. Prices come from live retailer data with a visible verification date, and disappear entirely when the data goes stale. We cannot make a product look cheaper than it is, because we do not type the numbers.
How to check any of this yourself
Hover any buy button and look at the destination — it will point at a /go/ address on this domain, which redirects to the retailer with our tag attached. Nothing is hidden in that chain, and the redirect exists so that we can change a destination later without rewriting an article.
If you would rather we did not earn anything, go to the retailer directly. It costs you nothing either way, and the information on this site is the same regardless.
Questions
Anything unclear here, or a link that looks wrong: contact us or email info@driftanddime.com.
Related: our editorial policy sets out the rules we hold ourselves to, and how we pick explains the scoring.