Affiliate disclosure
How this site makes money, which links earn nothing, and what we do to stop the money deciding the recommendations.
How the links work
Links to Amazon on this site carry our Associates tracking tag. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise — the commission comes out of Amazon's margin, not your pocket.
Every earning link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", opens in a new tab, and carries a visible #ad label beneath it. Links route through a redirect at /go/ so we can see which recommendations people find useful.
Which links earn nothing
Several products we rate highly are sold only by their own makers and have no Amazon listing. We earn nothing from those, and we link to them anyway where they are the right answer.
| Merchant | Do we earn? | How it is shown |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Yes, a commission | A buy button with #ad beneath it |
| Shibumi Shade | No | A plain reference link that says so |
| CoolCabana | No | A plain reference link that says so |
| Neso (direct store) | No | A plain reference link that says so |
| Sun Ninja (direct store) | No | Cited as a specification source |
Merchants we link to, and whether we earn from them.
What we do not do
- We do not sell placement. No manufacturer can pay to appear here, be ranked higher, or have criticism removed. Nobody has tried hard enough to make this a difficult commitment.
- We do not accept products. Nothing on this site has been supplied to us, which is also why no page claims hands-on testing.
- We do not show manufacturers pages before publication.
- We do not rank by commission rate. Where a product that earns us nothing is the better answer, it goes first — Shibumi vs Neso and Cool Cabana vs Shibumi are both examples.
How we stop the money deciding
Mostly by structure rather than willpower. Picks come from a single product registry with a verification bar — currently sold, specifications published by the maker — and ranking criteria that are stated on every page: weight, packed size, how it anchors. None of those criteria has anything to do with what a product pays.
The visible test is whether a site ever recommends something it earns nothing from. We do, on several pages, and we point it out each time.
Prices
We publish a price only from live retailer data, stamped with the date it was checked, and prices expire automatically if that data stops updating. At present no live price feed is connected, so every product shows "check price on Amazon" instead of a number. Prices on Amazon change constantly, and the price you see there is the one that applies.
The required statement
Dune & Shade 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.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a page is not disclosing properly, email contact@duneandshade.com. Related reading: how we pick and our editorial policy.