Affiliate commission funds this site. Here is exactly how that works, and what it does not affect.
The short version. Some of the links on this site earn us a commission if you buy. It never costs you anything extra, and it never changes the order things appear in. The cheapest shop is whichever shop is cheapest.
The String Gauge is free to use and carries no advertising. It is funded by affiliate commission: when you click through to certain retailers and go on to buy something, that retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. It is at no extra cost to you — you pay the same price you would have paid going direct.
That is the entire business model. Nobody pays us for coverage, for a better position, or for a kinder write-up, and there is no arrangement under which they could.
Commission never affects ranking. When we tell you a shop is cheapest, that is arithmetic on the prices we captured that night — nothing else is in the calculation. A retailer that pays us nothing will be shown above one that pays us well, every time, if their price is lower.
We track six UK retailers. We hold affiliate relationships with some of them and not others, and we show all six on identical terms. If that were not true the site would be worthless, and so would we.
We have a live affiliate relationship with Scan, through the Awin network. Applications with other retailers we track are in progress. Where no relationship exists, your click goes straight through to the shop and we earn nothing from it — the listing appears anyway, because leaving it out would make the comparison a lie.
This page is updated when that changes.
Every outbound link on this site — commission-earning or not — passes
through our own /go/ redirect so we can count the click. You will see that
in your browser's status bar as you hover. Pages carrying commission-earning links also
carry a visible notice near the listings, not just this page in the footer.
Prices here are captured by an automated sweep, usually overnight. They move, and they occasionally go wrong. Always check the price on the retailer's own page before you buy — that price, not ours, is the one you will pay. Our terms cover this in more detail.
If anything here looks less than straight, say so: info@thestringgauge.co.uk.