Affiliate Disclosure

This page is not the disclosure

It's worth starting here, because it's the thing most sites get wrong.

A disclosure page, on its own, is not an adequate disclosure. Neither is a line in the footer. The FTC's guidance is that a disclosure must be clear, conspicuous, and next to the link it's disclosing — because a reader who clicks a buy button has almost certainly never visited a page like this one.

So on this site, every single earning link is labelled paid link, immediately adjacent to the link itself. It is rendered by the link component, it appears automatically, and there is no setting anywhere in our codebase that turns it off for a particular page or product. We built it that way deliberately: a compliance rule that a writer can forget is not a compliance rule.

This page exists to explain the details. It supplements the label next to the link. It does not replace it.

Why we say "paid link" and not "affiliate link"

Because the FTC specifically says "affiliate link" isn't good enough.

Their published guidance notes that consumers "might not understand that affiliate link means... getting paid," and states that a "paid link" label right next to an affiliate link should be an adequate disclosure. So that's the wording we use. It's two words, it's unambiguous, and it costs us nothing to be clear.

You can read the FTC's guidance yourself: The FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking.

Who actually pays us

Amazon.That's it, currently. The Espresso Report 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.

Some links on this site go to manufacturers — Gaggia, Rancilio, Baratza, Breville, De'Longhi — usually to a spec sheet or a product page we're citing. We earn nothing from those.They aren't labelled "paid link," because they aren't paid links, and labelling them as such would be its own kind of lie.

If that ever changes — if we join another program — this page will change with it, and the labels on the affected links will start appearing automatically. That's a consequence of how the site is built, not a promise we have to remember to keep.

What money does not buy on this site

• Placement. No one can pay to be recommended here, to be ranked higher, or to be included at all. We have never been offered it and we would say no.
• A better score. Our scoringis based on published specs, current price, and what owners report. Commission is not one of the five components, and there isn't a sixth.
• A softer review.Several products on this site earn us money and we still tell you what's wrong with them. That's the job.

We link buyer-first, even when it pays less

This is the part that actually costs us something, so it's worth being specific.

Where the better option for you is the one that earns us less — or nothing — we link the better option. The clearest example on this site: the Eureka Mignon Specialita, which we recommend on our grinder page, isn't stocked on Amazon at all. We could quietly drop it and recommend something we'd get paid for. We don't, because it's a genuinely good grinder and you asked us what to buy, not what we'd like you to buy.

Similarly, beans earn roughly one percent — effectively nothing — so our beans page makes no attempt to be a revenue page. It just tells you the truth, which is that fresh beans are the cheapest upgrade available to you and most people skip them.

About the prices you see here

Every price on this site comes from Amazon's API and is stamped with the date we pulled it. Prices and availability change constantly, and the price you see on Amazon at checkout is the price that applies — not the one we showed you.

If our data goes stale (more than 48 hours old), the site stops showing a number and shows "Check price on Amazon" instead. We would rather show you nothing than show you something wrong. More on that in how we review.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we've fallen short of it somewhere on the site, email info@theespressoreport.comand we'll fix it. Our correction commitment is in the editorial policy.