Affiliate disclosure
How this site is funded, stated plainly, and why it does not change what we recommend.
By Ryder M.Last updated
Thump & Tote earns commission when you buy through our links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra, Amazon is currently the only program we participate in, and commission never decides the order of a list.
How the links work
When you click a "Check price on Amazon" button on this site, you pass through a short redirect on our own domain and land on Amazon's product listing. If you then buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is identical to what you would pay going to Amazon directly — affiliate commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your pocket.
Every outbound commercial link on this site is marked `rel="sponsored nofollow"` in the page source, which is what Google's link-spam policy requires, and opens in a new tab so you do not lose your place.
Which programs we are part of
| Program | Status |
|---|---|
| Amazon Associates (US) | Active — every buy link on this site |
| Direct brand programs | None |
| CJ, Awin and other affiliate networks | None |
| Sponsored content or paid placements | None, and none accepted |
If that changes — if we join a brand's own program because it genuinely offers readers a better price, stock position or warranty than Amazon — this table gets updated before any such link goes live.
Why it does not change what we recommend
This is the part that matters, and the honest test of it is simple: this site's entire premise is recommending cheaper products. A cheaper speaker earns us less commission than an expensive one. If commission were steering the recommendations, the roundups would open with the premium option every time. They do not — they open with the value pick, and the premium option appears as a benchmark to measure it against.
Concretely, the rules we hold ourselves to:
- Ranking is by value to the reader, never by commission rate or product price.
- No brand has ever seen a page before it published, and none pays to appear.
- We name what every product gives up, including the ones we recommend most.
- We recommend against buying where that is the right answer — several pages here argue you should spend less, or not upgrade.
- Discontinued and last-generation models are recommended freely, even though they frequently earn less and go out of stock.
About prices on this site
We do not print dollar figures anywhere. Street prices on portable speakers move weekly, and a number written into an article is misleading within a month — which is a small dishonesty that is easy to commit and hard for a reader to catch.
Instead, every recommendation carries a live link to the retailer's own listing, and that listing is the price of record. Where you see a price band described — "under $50", "under $100" — that is a description of the segment a speaker is sold into, not a quoted price for a specific unit.
About product images
We hold no manufacturer product photography, so the images beside product entries are licensed stock photographs of the general category rather than the specific unit. They carry a visible "Illustrative" label wherever they appear. More on this in how we pick.
Your rights and the rules we follow
US Federal Trade Commission guidance requires affiliate relationships to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, near the links themselves rather than only in a footer. That is why a disclosure banner appears above the first affiliate link on every commercial page on this site, as well as under every individual buy button and in the footer of every page.
The Amazon Associates Operating Agreement requires the statement "As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases", which appears on this page, in our footer and under our buy buttons. It also restricts publishing specific prices outside the live price feed, which is one more reason this site does not quote them.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site has been influenced by commission, we would genuinely like to hear about it: contact@thumpandtote.com, or via the contact page. Our broader standards are on the editorial policy.