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Key & Crate

Affiliate disclosure

Key & Crate earns a commission when you buy through our links, at no extra cost to you. Here is exactly how that works and what it does not change.

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The statement

Key & Crate 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.

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. When you click a product link on this site and buy something, Amazon pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway — the commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not added to your bill.

This is how the site is funded. There is no subscription, no paywall and no advertising, and we would rather tell you that plainly than bury it in a footer.

Product links on this site pass through our own /go/ address before arriving at the retailer. That exists for two practical reasons and no sinister one: it lets us re-point a product to a different retailer later without editing every page that mentions it, and it lets us count how many people clicked, which is the only way we can tell which guides are useful.

Every one of those links is marked in the page’s code as a paid link — technically rel="sponsored nofollow" — which is what search engines ask publishers to do and which many do not. They open in a new tab so you keep your place.

Links to sources, government agencies, standards bodies and our own pages are ordinary links and earn us nothing.

What the commission does not change

The honest concern about affiliate sites is that commission shapes the recommendations. Here is specifically how we work against that:

  • We rank by what is right for the reader, not by what pays more. Several of our top picks are the cheapest option in their category, which means they pay us the least.
  • We tell readers to buy things secondhand — plates, cutlery, cast iron, bed frames, dining furniture — and we earn nothing at all from that advice.
  • We tell readers not to buy things. Our budget pages say to skip the air fryer, the stand mixer, the second blender and most decoration.
  • No brand has paid for placement or reviewed a page before publication.
  • There is no sponsored content on this site. If that changes it will be labeled unmistakably at the top of the page.

The standards behind that are set out in the editorial policy, and what our picks are actually based on is in how we pick.

About the prices you see

Every price on this site comes from a live lookup against Amazon’s own catalog and is shown with the date it was checked. None is typed in by hand.

Prices change constantly, and ours expire after 48 hours. If the daily refresh stops working, every number on the site disappears and the pages fall back to “check price on Amazon” rather than showing you something stale. The price you see at checkout is the price that applies — always check it there before buying.

Availability changes too. A product that was in stock when the page was last checked may not be now.

About the product images

Product photographs come from Amazon’s own product catalog, supplied for this purpose through the Associates program, and are displayed alongside a link to that product on Amazon. We do not re-host, edit or crop them, and we do not take product photographs of our own.

The atmospheric photographs on our hub and homepage are licensed stock. They illustrate a room type and are never presented as a photograph of a specific product, of our premises, or of work we have done.

Other retailers

At present every product link on this site goes to Amazon. We mention that because some sites imply broad retailer coverage while linking to one, and because it is relevant to how you read our picks: we are recommending the best option we can find on Amazon, not the best option in existence.

Where a product is genuinely better bought elsewhere, or where buying secondhand is the right answer, we say so in the text even though we earn nothing from it.

If we add other retailers in future, the same rule will apply — a buy link will only ever point somewhere we can disclose, and the disclosure on this page will be updated to name them.

Why this page exists

The US Federal Trade Commission requires that material connections between a publisher and the products it recommends are disclosed clearly and conspicuously. We agree with the principle, so in addition to this page:

  • Every page with product links carries a disclosure above the first one.
  • Every buy button is marked #ad with a link back to this page.
  • Every outbound product link is tagged as a paid link in the page’s code.

The FTC’s guidance for publishers is at ftc.gov.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have fallen short of it, write to us at contact@keyandcrate.com or through the contact form. Key & Crate is published by Iron Mako Media.