Affiliate disclosure

CheckBeforeYouShop is free to use. Some links on this site are referral links: if you join a shopping portal through one, that portal may pay us a referral bonus. This is how we keep the lights on, and it's the reason this page exists: the FTC (rightly) requires us to tell you this, and we'd rather over-explain vs under-explain. ("Us" is PickaPoint LLC, the one-person Georgia company that runs this site; referral relationships are held in its name.)

How the "Shop via …" links work

When you click a "Shop via …" button, you pass through a quick redirect on our site before landing on the portal. That hop lets us count the click (which comparisons people actually find useful) and, where a portal's program allows it, attach our referral code.

We measure this privately. We do not store your IP address, your browser's user-agent, or any profile of you. Each click is tagged only with a one-way code that is re-scrambled every day, so clicks can't be linked back to you or joined together across days. Today none of these links carry a referral code at all; they're plain links, routed through the redirect purely so we can see what's working.

What a referral link never buys

• Rankings. Rate tables are ordered by the rates themselves (or by your own valuation settings). A portal cannot pay to move up.
• Numbers. Rates come from the portals' public pages, read automatically and shown with their timestamp and original wording. Referral relationships don't touch them.
• Verdicts. "Is this a good rate?" is worked out from that store's own rate history. A referral relationship doesn't touch it.

Sponsored placement

If a slot is ever sponsored (for example a featured placement on the home page or in the newsletter), it will be clearly labeled as such, right where you see it.

Some links earn nothing

Where a portal's referral terms don't allow placement on a site like ours, we link to it anyway, plainly. You'll see every portal that tracks a store, not just the ones that pay us.

Questions? Contact us.