Transparency

The short version, which is also the version printed across the top of every page on this site: CheerFinds is paid by retailers. If an offer you found here is honoured at a shop’s checkout, that shop may send us a share of the sale. You pay exactly the same either way.

How the money moves

Most links on CheerFinds are affiliate links. Following one attaches a tag to your visit identifying where it came from. If you then buy something, the retailer’s affiliate network records the sale and the retailer pays a commission on it — usually a small percentage, sometimes a flat fee, and occasionally nothing at all, because plenty of programmes decline to pay on discounted orders. That commission is the entire business model. There is no advertising on this site, no sponsorship, no paid placement and nothing for sale.

What the payment does not buy

This is the part that matters, so it is set out as a list rather than buried in a paragraph.

• It does not change your price. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your total. There is no version of the checkout where you would have paid less by typing the address in yourself.
• It does not buy a position. Offers are ordered by size of discount, by the date they end, or alphabetically — never by what a programme pays. No retailer has ever been moved up a page for money, and none can be.
• It does not buy an entry. A shop cannot pay to be listed, and paying more does not keep it listed when its offers run out.
• It does not shape the words. The conditions printed on an offer are the conditions the retailer gave, whether or not they make the offer look worse.

Where the disclosure appears

The FTC asks that a material connection be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation rather than tucked away in a footer. On CheerFinds it appears in four places: a bar directly beneath the site’s masthead on every page; the transparency note in the masthead itself; a line immediately above every list of offers; and this page, which is linked from all of them and from the footer.

Links that pay us nothing

Some entries carry a plain link to a retailer because we are not in that shop’s programme, or because the programme does not pay on that kind of order. We do not mark those separately, because doing so would suggest the rest were somehow less trustworthy. The safe assumption is that any outbound link here may earn us something.

Networks we work through

Commission is handled by affiliate networks rather than paid to us directly by shops. Those networks set tracking cookies of their own when you follow a link; what they store and for how long is described in our cookie policy. The industry codes those networks enforce on publishers are set out rule by rule in our coupon code policy.

Questions about it

If anything here is unclear, or you think a particular page reads as though it were paid for, write to us at shahida@cheerfinds.com or through the contact page, and we will either explain the ordering or change it.