Where things stand today
As of right now, this site carries no affiliate links and earns no commissions. There is nothing on SmartHealthCompass you can click that pays us if you buy something. We have no active affiliate relationships with any merchant or network.
We’re telling you this plainly because the opposite mistake — a site claiming a commercial arrangement it doesn’t have, or staying vague about it — is just as much a disclosure failure as hiding one that does exist.
We do intend to add affiliate links in the future. When we do, this page will be updated to say so, with the date, and every commercial page will carry its own disclosure before the link. The rest of this page describes the rules that will apply the moment that happens. It’s published now, ahead of time, so the standard is on the record before there’s any money involved — and so you can hold us to it.
Why you’re seeing this
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires that material connections between a reviewer and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation itself — not buried in a footer or a page you’d have to go looking for.
We think that’s the right standard, and we intend to go a little past the minimum: when commercial links exist, the disclosure will appear adjacent to the call-to-action on the page, in plain language, on every commercial page.
How it will work
When we link to a product, that link may carry a tracking code identifying us. If you buy within the seller’s tracking window, we earn a percentage of the sale or a flat fee. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same as it would be without our link.
We expect to work with affiliate networks such as ClickBank and MaxWeb, and may add others. Commission rates vary by merchant and product, and we don’t control them. Until this page says otherwise, none of these arrangements are in place.
What this does and doesn’t influence
It will not influence: which products we review, what score they get, how they rank in a comparison, whether we recommend them, or what we say about the evidence behind them.
It will influence which products are practically available for us to link to. If a product has no affiliate program, we can still review it and rate it well — we just don’t earn anything if you buy it. That’s a real economic pressure, and rather than claim we’re immune to it, we’ve built the process so it can’t act on conclusions:
- Editorial approval and commercial eligibility are separate, separately recorded decisions.
- A product with no affiliate offer can be reviewed, recommended, and ranked first.
- The “top pick” in a comparison is recorded as an editorial choice, independently of table ordering.
- Merchants have no visibility into or approval over content before publication.
Our Editorial Policy describes these safeguards in more detail.
What we don’t do
We don’t accept payment for a favorable review. We don’t sell placement in rankings or comparisons. We don’t let merchants preview, approve, or veto content. We don’t publish sponsored posts disguised as reviews — if we ever publish sponsored content, it will be labeled as such and will not be presented as a review.
Leaving this site
Affiliate links, once they exist, take you to a third-party website — usually the manufacturer’s. Once you’re there, you’re on their site, under their terms and their privacy policy, and any purchase is between you and them.
We’re not the seller. We don’t process payments, ship products, handle returns, or provide customer service. Pricing, availability, and promotions are set by the merchant and can change without notice, which means what you see on their page may differ from what we recorded when we wrote ours.
For anything to do with an order — refunds, shipping, defects, cancellations — contact the merchant directly. We can’t resolve it, though we’d like to know if a merchant we link to is treating people badly, because it affects whether we keep linking to them.
Link maintenance
Commercial links will be re-checked on a schedule. When we can’t verify that a link still goes where we said it goes, we stop displaying it and show an editorial note instead. We’d rather show you nothing than send you somewhere we haven’t confirmed.
Amazon and other programs
If we join the Amazon Associates Program or a similar program with its own required disclosure language, we’ll add that language here and on the relevant pages. As of this writing, we are not an Amazon Associate.
Questions
If anything about how we’re funded is unclear, ask us through the Contact page. If you think we’ve failed to disclose something we should have, we want to hear about that specifically — it’s the kind of error we’d want to fix immediately.
Last updated: see the date shown on this page. When our commercial arrangements change materially, we update this disclosure.