Affiliate disclosure

The disclosure

Arc & Bead 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. If you click a product link on this site and buy something, we may receive a commission. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had gone to Amazon directly.

How the links work

Every product link on this site goes through an on-site redirect at /go/ before sending you to the retailer. That exists so that the retailer for any given product is a single configuration entry rather than something written into sixty-five pages of copy — if a better option becomes available for a product, we change it in one place.

Every earning link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", which is what Google's link policy requires, and opens in a new tab.

At the moment every affiliate link on this site is an Amazon link. We have not joined any other affiliate program relevant to welding, and we do not build tracking links for programs we have not joined.

What we do not do

We do not let commission decide a recommendation. On several pages the honest answer is the cheapest machine on the page. On one page the honest answer is an angle grinder instead of the plasma cutter the page is about. Those pages earn less and they are correct.

We do not take payment for placement. No manufacturer has paid to appear on this site, and no manufacturer has been given the opportunity to review a page before it was published.

We do not accept free products in exchange for coverage. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page in question, plainly and above the fold.

We do not publish prices. There is no live price feed for this site, so any figure we printed would be a snapshot we could not keep current. Every button reads "Check price on Amazon" and takes you to the current figure at the retailer.

Where disclosure appears

In the footer of every page on the site. Above the fold on every roundup and comparison — the pages where a purchase recommendation is being made. And beneath every individual buy button, marked #ad, with a link back to this page.

It is never collapsed, dismissible or hidden behind a tooltip.

Why we take affiliate income at all

Because the alternatives are worse. The realistic ways to fund a site like this are advertising, sponsored content, a paywall, or affiliate commission.

Display advertising makes pages slower and uglier and has no relationship to whether the advice is any good. Sponsored content means a manufacturer decides what gets written. A paywall on beginner welding guidance would put it behind exactly the barrier the site exists to remove.

Affiliate commission has one genuine conflict of interest — the incentive to recommend the expensive thing — and it is a conflict we can be transparent about and check ourselves against. How We Pick sets out the method, and the last question in it is explicitly "is this the buyer's best option, or ours?".

Your privacy

When you click a product link, the retailer receives a tag identifying this site as the referrer. We do not receive your name, email, address or payment details — only aggregate reporting on whether a purchase happened.

Our privacy policy covers what this site itself collects.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation has been influenced by commission, we would rather hear it. Email contact@arcandbead.com.

Arc & Bead is published by Magoo Media Group.