Affiliate disclosure

The business model in one paragraph

Best Hockey Gear is a free, independent editorial site funded by retailer commissions. When you click through one of our links and buy a product, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale — usually between 1% and 8% depending on the program and product category. This commission comes out of the retailer’s existing marketing budget; it doesn’t add anything to your price, and you’d pay exactly the same if you typed the URL directly into your browser.

Programs we participate in

besthockeygear.com is a participant in (or actively applying to) the following affiliate programs:

As an Amazon Associate, Best Hockey Gear earns from qualifying purchases. Amazon, the Amazon logo, AmazonSupply, and the AmazonSupply logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

How we keep this honest

Commission rates don’t influence our editorial decisions. Specifically:

• Scoring rubric is the same for every product regardless of commission rate. A stick that pays 2% gets scored on the same five-category 50-point scale as one that pays 8%.
• “Best deal” tags go to the lowest in-stock price, not the retailer paying us the highest commission. If Amazon is cheapest, Amazon wins. If a non-affiliate retailer is cheapest, we list them anyway.
• We disclose commission-bearing links on every review with a per-page disclosure block in the footer, plus this site-wide page.
• Affiliate links use rel=”nofollow sponsored” per FTC and Google guidelines.
• We don’t accept paid editorial placements. No sponsored reviews, no pay-to-play “best of” lists, no manufacturer-funded comparisons.

What we do with referral data

The retailers we partner with tell us only aggregate stats — how many clicks we sent and what we earned. We don’t see who you are, what you bought, or what you looked at on their site. Our analytics tracks only that you clicked a “View deal” button, not your downstream purchase behavior. See our privacy policy for the full data-handling explanation.

How to support us without using affiliate links

If you’d rather not contribute commission to us, you can:

• Type the retailer’s URL into your browser directly.
• Buy through us anyway and feel good knowing the price is identical — you’re not paying more.
• Sign up for our newsletter (no affiliate links in there) — growing the audience helps us land better partner deals.

Questions

Anything unclear? Drop us a line and we’ll add an FAQ section here for whatever comes up.