Affiliate Disclosure

Plain-English Summary

theRANKS earns affiliate commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

In practice: when you click a Buy or product link on this site and then complete a purchase at the retailer, we may earn a commission from that retailer. The price you pay is unchanged whether you click our link or type the retailer’s URL directly into your browser.

FTC Compliance

This disclosure is published in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), including the 2023 update. theRANKS materially participates in the affiliate programs listed below, and our content is a material connection to those programs as defined by the FTC.

Every page on theRANKS that contains affiliate links also carries a brief disclosure in the footer, with a direct link back to this page for the full text. Every Buy link on a product or ranking page is an affiliate link - there are no hidden affiliate URLs disguised as plain recommendations.

Programs We Participate In

theRANKS earns commissions through the following affiliate programs. The list is comprehensive at the date below; new programs may be added as we cover new categories, and the "Last updated" date reflects any change to this list.

• Amazon Associates - the primary affiliate program for the majority of products covered. theRANKS 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.
• Amazon Creator Connections - Amazon campaign links used on selected placements, which route to Amazon.
• Levanta - Amazon-routed campaign links covering WOW Tech (We-Vibe, Womanizer, Arcwave, ROMP, pjur) and Tracy’s Dog.
• Impact - Fleshlight (Fleshlight and Fleshjack) and COTR Inc. (Le Wand).
• CJ Affiliate - LELO.
• Awin - Uberlube and Hot Octopuss.
• Lovense - a direct affiliate relationship with the brand.
• We may join additional programs. This list is updated when we do, and a program appears here only once the relationship is live.

How Commission Rates Vary

Commission rates vary by program, by product category, and sometimes by individual product. They are set by the retailer or brand, not by us, and they change without notice. We do not publish specific rates here because any figure would be out of date the moment a program revised it.

What the commission rate does decide is which merchant a Buy link routes to when more than one of them sells the same item: we send the click to the better-paying route for the same product. What it does not decide is the order of a ranking.

What Determines Ranking Order

The composite score described in our methodology - demand, trust, value, quality and durability - is the order of a ranking. Where two comparable products are separated by less than the noise in their own scores, the better-paying route can break that tie; it never promotes a product a reader would be worse off buying.

Short answers to the questions this raises most often are on the FAQ.

Gifted Products and Press Samples

theRANKS does not solicit free product samples for evaluation. Where a product is provided unsolicited by a brand or PR firm - the routine practice in consumer-product journalism - we do not treat that gift as a commitment to cover the product.

When a member of the team has personally evaluated a product, the article notes whether that evaluation involved a gifted unit, a retail-purchased unit, or a borrowed unit. This is a standard journalistic disclosure and it does not change how the composite is computed.

Third-Party Tracking on Affiliate Links

When you click an affiliate link from theRANKS, the destination retailer (for example Amazon, or a network such as Impact, CJ, Awin or Levanta) may set cookies or collect analytics about the referring page, the click time, and your subsequent purchase. Those data collection practices are governed by the retailer’s own privacy policy, not ours. The retailer uses that data to attribute commissions to the referring site; we separately record our own outbound click events - the product, the originating page, the time, a first-party session identifier, a hashed user agent, and country-level location - so we can tell which pages send traffic and reconcile commission reports. We do not receive your name, payment details, or order contents from any retailer.

theRANKS does not share any personally identifiable information about you with any affiliate network. The affiliate ID in the link is a site-level identifier, not a user-level identifier.

Contact for Disclosure Questions

If you have a question about a specific affiliate relationship, a particular product’s commission structure, or a gap in this disclosure, write to kyle@the-ranks.com. That is the only contact address for theRANKS; any other address attributed to us is out of date.