Affiliate Disclosure

The Affiliate Disclosure for WhatIsBlackfriday explains how this website earns money, what affiliate links are, and how they relate to the Black Friday deals coverage, Cyber Monday sales guides, and product buying advice published across the site. We put this page together in plain language because a disclosure nobody understands isn’t much of a disclosure.

Here is the short version: when you buy a product through certain links on this site, the retailer pays us a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it is how most independent shopping publications keep the lights on. The rest of this page explains exactly how that works and what it does not change.

We would rather you read this than take our word for it. Understanding how a deals site makes money is part of judging whether its recommendations deserve your attention, and we think that judgment should be straightforward to make.

What Affiliate Marketing Is

Affiliate marketing is a payment arrangement between retailers and publishers. A store like Amazon or Walmart gives websites special tracking links. When a reader clicks one of those links and completes a purchase, the store pays the website a percentage of the sale as a referral fee.

The fee comes out of the retailer’s side of the transaction. The price you pay at checkout is the same as if you had typed the store’s address into your browser. Nothing about your order changes because you arrived through one of our pages.

This model exists because retailers want shoppers, and publishers want to keep producing content without charging subscriptions. Affiliate commissions sit in the middle as a practical way to connect the two. It is a common arrangement, and it is the primary way WhatIsBlackfriday is supported.

Where Affiliate Links Appear on This Site

Affiliate links appear on most of the pages where we talk about products and prices. That includes our Black Friday deal roundups, Cyber Monday sales guides, Amazon Prime Day coverage, retailer deal pages, and buying guides for categories like laptops, cameras, TVs, and home appliances.

Not every link on this site earns a commission. Links to retailer sale pages, price history tools, or informational references are often plain links with no tracking attached. There is no visual difference between the two types, and we do not expect readers to tell them apart.

We disclose the arrangement at the page level instead of marking every single link, as doing so would clutter the page. If a page discusses products you can buy, assume some of its links may be affiliate links. That assumption is safe everywhere on this site.

What We Earn and What You Pay

Commission rates vary by retailer and by product category. Electronics might pay one percentage, home goods another, and some retailers pay a flat fee per order regardless of the total. We do not control these rates, and they change throughout the year, often getting adjusted right before the holiday season.

The important part for you is the buyer’s side: the commission never gets added to your price. Retailers factor referral fees into their normal marketing budgets. Whether you use our link or not, the product costs the same at checkout.

We sometimes name better offers from retailers we have no affiliate relationship with. That happens when a store has the lowest verified price, and we are not going to bury it just because another merchant pays us. Our deal pages have called attention to lower prices at retailers with no commission program, and they will again.

How Affiliate Links Work Behind the Scenes

When you click an affiliate link, the retailer places a small file called a cookie in your browser. That cookie records that you arrived from WhatIsBlackfriday. If you buy something from that store within a set window — often 24 hours, sometimes longer — the cookie connects your order back to this site.

The cookie does not tell us who you are, what card you used, or anything else personal about you. Retailers report orders to publishers in aggregate: a product was purchased, and a commission was earned. Your identity stays with the store you bought from, under that store’s own privacy policy.

If you would rather not be tracked at all, you can search the product name on the retailer’s site directly instead of clicking through. You will pay the same price either way. We would rather lose a commission than have a reader feel steered into something they did not want.

How Commissions Relate to Our Coverage

Affiliate commissions do not decide what we cover or how we rank it. Our Black Friday deal pages are organized around price drops, product quality, and fit for the reader. A high commission on a product nobody should buy is worth nothing to us, because we would have to stand behind it afterward.

No retailer pays to appear in our deal guides. Placement is not sold, ranked by commission rate, or traded for access. When we say a deal is one of the strongest we have seen in a category, that statement is based on pricing history and product research, not on which store is paying what.

Brands and retailers cannot see our coverage before it is published. Nobody outside the editorial team reviews our pages in advance. If a company wants a recommendation from us, the way to earn one is to have the better product at the better price.

Why a Deals Site Discloses This at All

The United States Federal Trade Commission requires websites to disclose material connections between publishers and the companies they write about. Affiliate commissions count as a material connection because they give us a financial interest in whether you buy from a particular retailer.

We treat that requirement as a starting point rather than a ceiling. The rule exists so shoppers can weigh recommendations knowing who pays for them. We publish this page, reference it from our coverage, and keep the language simple because a disclosure you can actually read does the job the rule intends.

Readers in other countries may notice similar requirements under their own consumer protection rules. The principle is the same everywhere: when a website earns money from a purchase, you deserve to know about it before you click.

How Our Buying Guides Stay Independent

Our buying guides follow a fixed process. We research the category, compare specifications and pricing history, and recommend the products that offer the most value at the time of writing. Affiliate relationships are not part of the selection criteria, and commission rates are not part of the ranking order.

When we test or handle products, we say so in the guide. Some review units are purchased with our own money, some are provided by brands for evaluation, and some are assessed from specification sheets and published pricing data alone. Each guide tells you which situation applies.

A product sent to us free of charge gets no special treatment. Items we would not recommend to a family member do not make our pages regardless of where they came from, and we return or ignore plenty of them.

Prices, Availability, and Their Limits

Affiliate relationships give us no control over prices, stock, or shipping. Retailers change offers constantly during the holiday season, sometimes within hours. Our pages carry a date and are updated when we catch a change, but we cannot guarantee that every price on every page matches the checkout price at the moment you click.

We verify prices before publishing, and we re-check them during the major sales events. When a reader reports an expired deal, that page is corrected quickly. Still, the retailer always shows the final price at checkout, and that is the number your purchase decision should rely on.

This limit is one reason we push readers toward price history tools and away from list prices. A discount is only real if the original number was honest. Retailers know list prices get inflated before big events, and we would rather teach you the habit of checking than pretend every percentage-off banner is a fact.

Advertising and Sponsored Content

Affiliate commissions are not the only way a site like ours can earn money, so it is worth stating where we stand on the others. We do not accept paid placements inside our deal guides, and we do not publish sponsored listicles presented as editorial recommendations.

If that changes, the change will be visible. Any paid or sponsored content will be labeled clearly as such, separate from our regular coverage, and this page will be updated to describe it in the same plain terms used here.

We also do not sell reader data, and we only accept advertising from companies we would mention editorially. A site built on trust in pricing advice cannot rent that trust out to whoever is buying it.

Questions About This Disclosure

If anything on this page is unclear, or if you want to ask about a specific recommendation and what stands behind it, our contact page is the place to write. We answer questions about commissions, coverage decisions, and corrections directly, and we do not send form-letter replies.

If you prefer not to use affiliate links at all, that is a completely reasonable choice. Browse our guides for the product and pricing information, then open the retailer’s site yourself. You will get the same price, and the guides will keep getting written either way.

Thank you for reading this far. A shopper who understands how a deals site is supported is in a stronger position than one who does not, and that strength is the whole reason this page exists.