Affiliate disclosure

WellSpecs is free to read. It's paid for by affiliate commissions: when you click a “Check price” button and then buy something, the store may pay us a share of that sale.

What an affiliate link is

It's an ordinary link with a tag that tells the store which site sent you. If you buy within the store's tracking window, the store credits the sale to us and pays a commission. Each brand's program sets its own commission rate and window, so they differ from store to store.

Where you'll see them

Affiliate links on WellSpecs are the “Check price” buttons. They go through an address that starts with wellspecs.com/go/. Next to each button, or under a group of them, there's the line “Affiliate link” (or “Affiliate links”), which links to this page.

Links inside the text work differently. When a sentence links to a brand page, a manual, an FDA record or a study, that link is the source of a fact, and it isn't an affiliate link.

Not every model has a button. If neither the brand nor a store that sells the model runs an affiliate program, there's no button. The model is still listed and scored the same way as the rest, but it comes after the models with a button, and we don't pick it.

What a commission changes, and what it doesn't

Scores come from five criteria worked out from the device database: the FDA record, published specs, price, warranty and returns, and owner reviews. Whether a brand pays a commission isn't one of them. The full method, with the points for each criterion, is on How we research devices.

The commission does affect the order. By default, lists show models with a “Check price” button first; inside that group and among the rest, models go by score. The top pick on a list, and the picks on section and guide pages, come only from models with a button. To see every model by score alone, sort a list by “Highest score”.

Brands can't pay for a score, and we don't take placement fees. A brand can send us spec sheets, manuals or test reports. We treat them like any other source: they're cited, dated and checked against the rest.

Prices

Every price on the site is copied from a store page and shown with the date we checked it. Stores change prices often, so the price at checkout is the one that counts.

The rules we follow

This page and the line under each button are how we disclose that commission, as the Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 CFR Part 255) ask review sites with affiliate links to do. If you find a button without that line, or a link that looks wrong, please tell us.