Why some links here now earn us a commission

A few links on Allison Feet now earn us a commission when you buy through them. They are marked, they sit in one guide and on one page, and this post explains why they exist, what they change and what they do not.

The short version: the site is funded by buyer memberships, and that does not change. Affiliate links are a small second income that costs you nothing and never touches how sellers are shown.

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a shop with a tracking code on it. If you click it and buy something, the shop pays us a share of the sale. You pay the same price you would have paid without the link. Nothing is added to your bill, and the shop does not learn who you are from us; the link tells it which of our pages you came from, nothing more.

Where the links are

The seller toolkit. Our seller toolkit guide describes what sellers use for their photos: light, a tripod, props, foot and nail care, a watermark. Where a shop sells something that fits that advice, we link it next to the advice. The advice came first and stays first. A shop earns a place by fitting it, not the other way round.

The affiliates page. Every shop we have an arrangement with is listed on the affiliates page, with a short description of what it sells and the same disclosure you are reading now. Two shops are listed as this post goes out. The page is the complete list; if a shop is not on it, no link to it earns us anything.

How you can tell

• Every affiliate link says so, with the words "affiliate link" right next to it.
• Every page that holds one carries a disclosure at the top, before the first link.
• The links are labelled as sponsored for search engines, which is the rule for paid links.
• They never appear on the safety page, the report pages, the legal pages, or in the emails we send you about your account. Those places are for help, not for selling.

What it does not change

The directory, the feed and the leaderboard. No shop pays for a seller to be shown, placed higher, or featured. The directory is ordered by verification date, the feed by time, the leaderboard by points for activity on the site. None of that is for sale, and an affiliate arrangement gives a shop no say in any of it.

Our advice. The toolkit tells you what to look for before it tells you where to buy. If a shop stopped fitting the advice, the link would go, not the advice.

Your data. We set no advertising cookie for this and share nothing about you with the shops. The click goes through the shop's affiliate network, which records it on its own website so the shop can credit us, and then sends you on. What the network and the shop do on their own sites is covered by their privacy policies, which is true of any shop you visit.

What you pay here. Browsing and selling stay free. Buyers still pay one prepaid membership, which still does not renew by itself.

Why do this at all

Two reasons.

The first is that sellers ask. "Which tights?" and "What do you use for hard skin?" come up often enough that we wrote the toolkit. Once a guide recommends a kind of product, linking a shop that sells it is a service to the reader, and an affiliate arrangement is the honest way to be paid for that service: the shop pays, the reader does not.

The second is that a site like this has costs that do not go away: identity checks, video, storage, moderation. Memberships cover them. A second, minor income that does not depend on members makes the site a little steadier without asking anyone for more money.

The honest part

Affiliate links will not make much. The shops pay a small percentage of small purchases, and a guide page gets far fewer visits than the feed. If this income ever becomes meaningful, it will be because the toolkit is genuinely useful and many sellers read it, which is the right order of things.

We also choose shops within our own rules. We link ranges that fit a site about feet and nothing else, and we leave out anything that does not, however well it might pay. The content rules that apply to every photo here apply to every partner as well.

If you ever see an affiliate link that is not marked, or one in a place we said it would never be, tell us. That would be a mistake, and we would rather hear about it from you than find it ourselves.

Where to look

• The affiliates page, for the full list and the plain-language version of all of the above.
• The seller toolkit, for the advice the links sit beside.
• The FAQ, for how the site is funded and what a membership covers.

Marked links, one page that lists them all, and nothing for sale that was not already for sale. That is the whole arrangement.