How We Make Money

How the links work

Every product link on this site routes through our own /go/ resolver, which adds our Amazon Associates tracking identifier (shovelreport-20) and forwards you to the retailer. If you buy something within the retailer's attribution window, we receive a percentage of the sale.

You pay exactly the same price you would pay going to the retailer directly. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your pocket, and nothing on this site is a discount code or a special arrangement.

Every outbound commercial link carries `rel="sponsored nofollow"` and opens in a new tab, and every buy button on this site carries an `#ad` label with a link back to this page. Those are the marks to look for.

Where we earn nothing

There are places on this site where we deliberately have no buy link, and it is worth naming them because they are the clearest evidence of how we treat the commission.

• Premium gas snow blowers. The machines that dominate the editorial "best snow blower" lists — the large two-stage gas units — are largely not sold through our retailer. We cover them editorially, with no buy button, rather than substituting something we can earn from. See electric versus gas.
• Safety and pure-technique pages. How to shovel snow properly carries no product picks at all. Attaching buy links to cardiac-risk guidance would be exactly the tenuous monetization we say we do not do.
• Recommendations to buy less. On short driveways we tell you a forty-dollar pusher beats a nine-hundred-dollar machine. That earns us a fraction as much and it is the right answer.
• Skip-this verdicts. Every roundup names at least one product not to buy, including products we would earn a commission on.

What the commission does not buy

No manufacturer has paid to appear on this site, been offered the opportunity to, or seen a page before publication. There is no sponsored content, no paid placement, no pay-for-position and no advertorial anywhere on Shovel Report.

We accept no free products. That is partly principle and partly a consequence of the methodology: we do not test, so there is nothing to send us.

Commission rates differ by product category, which is a real conflict of interest and worth stating rather than glossing. Our answer to it is structural: the ranking on every page is driven by a published rubric of specification-derived criteria, and every roundup carries an explicit do-not-buy verdict. If a page ever reads as though the commission chose the winner, that is a defect and we would like to hear about it.

Prices, and why they expire

Prices shown on this site come from a live data layer and are date-stamped where they appear. If that data is more than 48 hours old, the number disappears and the button reads "Check price on Amazon" instead.

Amazon prices change constantly, and a stale figure is worse than none because it looks authoritative and is wrong. We never hand-write a price, a star rating or a review count anywhere on this site.

Other networks

At the time of writing, Amazon is the only affiliate network this site earns through. We have joined no CJ or Awin programs, and we do not build tracked links for programs we have not joined — even where the program exists publicly and would pay better.

If that changes, this page changes with it, and the product links change to match. Every destination on the site is a configuration entry rather than a hardcoded URL, precisely so that a new relationship is a one-line change and not a quiet content rewrite.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are read and which buy links are clicked. We record a click event when you follow an affiliate link, so we can tell which recommendations are useful. What that data covers and how it is handled is set out on our privacy policy.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if a page reads as though it were written for the commission rather than the reader, write to info@shovelreport.com or use the contact form.