Policy
ReviewCatalog earns commissions when you buy through links on this site. Here is exactly what that means, what it doesn’t mean, and how we keep it from bending our verdicts.
Plain English version: Some of the links on this site send a small payment to us when you buy something. You pay the same price either way. We don’t get paid more for positive reviews, and we don’t take money from sellers to write specific things.
Our affiliate relationships
We participate in the AliExpress Affiliate Portals program. When you click a “View on AliExpress” button, a product image link, or any outbound link with a tracking tag and complete a purchase within the affiliate cookie window, AliExpress pays us a percentage of the sale price. The commission rate varies by category and promotion, and typically sits between 3% and 10%.
We may add additional affiliate programs in the future (for example, Amazon Associates if we ever cover cross-marketplace comparisons). When we do, we’ll list them here. As of this update, AliExpress is the only program we earn from.
How it affects our reviews — it doesn’t
This is the part most disclosures hand-wave. We’ll spell it out.
The commission is the same percentage no matter which product on AliExpress you buy. If we recommend product A over product B, and you buy B instead, we get paid the same. We literally cannot push you toward one product over another and earn more money from it. That’s by design. The AliExpress program pays on category, not on which seller or which item.
What this means: we have no financial reason to inflate scores. Roughly one in three of our test units gets a “skip it” verdict and we publish those just as prominently as the wins. About 20% of our reviews recommend a specifically different product than the one a buyer was probably searching for. That decision costs us search traffic and we do it anyway, because the next visit is worth more than this one.
FTC compliance
We follow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and the FTC’s 2023 updates on social media disclosures. Practically, that means:
- Every page that contains affiliate links carries a visible disclosure at the top, in plain English, before the affiliate links appear.
- Outbound affiliate links are marked with
rel="sponsored nofollow"in the HTML, in line with both FTC guidance and Google’s link attribution standards. - We do not use “honest opinion” or “objective review” language to imply we have no financial connection. We have one, and we’re telling you about it.
- Any video content we publish (currently on individual review pages, soon on a YouTube channel) carries a verbal disclosure within the first 30 seconds.
What “sponsored” means here
You will sometimes see the word “sponsored” on outbound links or in product cards. In our case, it means one thing only: this is an affiliate link, and we may earn a commission if you click and buy. It does not mean we were paid by the seller to feature the product. We have not, to date, accepted a paid placement, sponsored review, or “guaranteed positive” arrangement from any seller, and we don’t intend to start.
If we ever publish a piece of content that was paid for by a third party (for example, a long-form sponsored guide), it will carry an unambiguous “PAID PARTNERSHIP” label at the top, separate from the affiliate disclosure, and the partnership terms will be summarized inside the article. As of this update, no such content exists on the site.
How we choose which products to link to
Every product we recommend goes through the process described on our How We Review page and the full testing methodology. The short version: a product earns its recommendation by scoring well on our rubric, not by being part of a high-commission category. We’ve turned down adding affiliate tags to a few categories that pay well but whose products we don’t believe in.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you spot a link on the site that doesn’t match this disclosure, write to us at hello@reviewcatalog.com or through the contact page. We’ll fix mistakes within two business days. For how we handle your data more broadly, see the privacy policy.