What that means for you
Nothing, financially. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket, and the price you see at checkout is identical to the price you would see arriving at Amazon any other way. There is no markup, no coupon requirement, and no tracking of your purchase back to you personally — we only ever see aggregate reports that say a sale happened.
How the links work
Product links on this site route through a redirect at corkandcool.com/go/... before they reach the retailer. That exists so the destination for a product lives in one configuration file instead of being scattered across hundreds of pages — when a link needs changing, it changes once. The redirect adds our Amazon Associates tracking tag and sends you on. It is excluded from search indexing and stores nothing about you.
Every earning link on this site is marked up as a sponsored link for search engines, is labeled #ad where it appears, and opens in a new tab so you do not lose your place.
Why it does not change our rankings
This is the part that matters, so it is stated flatly: commission rate plays no part in how products are ordered on this site. Roundups are ranked on published specifications against the reader’s stated situation, and every entry carries a “skip this if” line telling you when not to buy it.
Where a brand’s own store is the better place to buy something — better price, better stock, better warranty handling — we say so, including in the cases where that earns us less than Amazon would, or nothing at all. The method behind all of this is written out in the editorial policy.
We also do not accept payment for placement, and no brand has ever paid to appear here. If that ever changes, the page will say so in a way you cannot miss.
What we do not do
- We do not publish prices — they change daily, and a stale price on a review page is worse than no price. Buy buttons say “Check price on Amazon” and send you where the live number is.
- We do not claim to have tested these products. We compare published specifications and documentation, and we say when a spec is unpublished.
- We do not run fake reviews, invented ratings or testimonials. There are none anywhere on this site.
Retailers we link to
Today, effectively all of them are Amazon. Where we mention a manufacturer’s own store because it is genuinely the better option, that link is a plain untracked link and earns us nothing. If we join a retailer program in future, this page will be updated to name it before any tracked link goes live.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a link is mislabeled, email contact@corkandcool.com or use the contact form. Disclosure complaints get answered, not ignored.