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Affiliate Disclosure

Last updated: 10 September 2026

This site earns money when you buy something through a link on it. That is the whole business model, and this page sets out exactly how it works, what it does not buy, and how to check any recommendation without paying us a cent.

The Wooden Stars 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.

The short version

  • Amazon is currently the only affiliate programme this site takes part in.
  • You pay the same price whether you use our link or not. The commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not out of your pocket.
  • No brand, retailer or manufacturer can buy a place on a list, a rating, or a kind word here. There is no rate card, because nothing is for sale.
  • Every product link on this site is marked rel="nofollow sponsored" in the page’s HTML, which is the machine-readable version of this disclosure.

Product links on this site carry our Associates tag, thewoodenstars-20. When you click one, Amazon records that the visit came from us and sets its own cookies on its own site. If you buy within the window Amazon allows, Amazon pays us an advertising fee on that order.

Amazon’s reports tell us which products were ordered through our links and in what quantity. They do not tell us who you are. We never receive your name, your address, your payment details or your Amazon account information, and there is no way for us to connect an order back to a particular visitor. What that leaves in our hands, and what the click itself reveals, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

What we earn

The fee is a percentage of the order, set by Amazon, and it differs by product category. Furniture pays at a different rate from tools, and Amazon changes those rates when it likes, without asking us and usually without warning. We are deliberately not quoting a figure here, because any number we published would be out of date within months.

Two things follow from that, and they are worth knowing:

  • A percentage of a $600 dining table is worth far more to us than a percentage of a $14 bottle of wood glue. That is a real incentive, pointing in a direction we do not want to go, which is why the next section exists.
  • We are paid on what you actually buy, not on what we linked to. If you follow a link to a nightstand and buy a lamp instead, Amazon still pays us. That is how the programme works everywhere; it is not a trick specific to this site.

Where the money pulls, and where we push back

The commercially optimal thing for an affiliate site to do is tell you to replace the thing. A replacement pays; a repair usually does not.

This site is built the other way round. Where a piece of furniture can be fixed, the fix comes first: a wobbling table is nearly always a joint that needs re-gluing, not a table that needs replacing, and that is what the page will tell you. Whole sections of this site — the drawer runners, the loose joints, the water rings, the stripped screw holes — exist to talk readers out of a purchase. They earn a fraction of what a buying guide earns. Keeping that order is the single most expensive editorial decision on this site, and it is the one we would ask you to judge us on. It is written down in full in the Editorial Policy.

Prices shown on this site come from Amazon, and they go stale

Where a price appears next to a product, it was pulled from Amazon’s own Product Advertising API and stamped with the date and time it was fetched. It is not a price we chose, and it is not a price we can honour.

Amazon changes prices constantly, and a figure captured last week may be wrong today. Amazon’s own terms require the timestamp for exactly this reason. Treat every price on this site as an indication of the band a product sits in, and take the figure on Amazon’s page at the moment of purchase as the only real one. The same goes for availability: “in stock” here means it was in stock when we last looked.

What the commission does not buy

  • No paid placement. Nobody has ever paid to appear on this site, and nobody can. If that ever changed, it would be labelled on the page itself, not buried on this one.
  • No sponsored or guest posts. We do not publish them. Emails offering them are not answered, which saves everybody time.
  • No free samples in exchange for coverage. We do not accept product sent to us on the understanding that it gets written about.
  • No approval rights. No brand sees a page before it goes live, and no brand can have one taken down because it is unflattering.
  • No hiding the flaws. Any comparison between an expensive piece and a cheaper look-alike is required to state where the cheaper one falls short — solid wood becoming veneer over particleboard, 25 mm slats becoming 18 mm, mortise-and-tenon joinery becoming bolts through a cam lock. Those are the sentences that cost us money, and they are the reason the page is worth reading.

Programmes we are not in

As of the date at the foot of this page, Amazon is the only affiliate programme this site participates in. There are no display ads, no sponsored newsletters, no lead-generation deals and no affiliate relationships with furniture retailers, marketplaces or manufacturers.

We expect that to change — retailers that sell replacement parts and wood-care products often pay better than Amazon does for exactly the sort of small, unglamorous item this site recommends most. If and when we join another programme, it will be named on this page and the date at the foot will change. This page is meant to stay accurate, not to stay short.

How to check us, or buy without paying us

Nothing here depends on you using our links.

  • Search the product name on Amazon yourself. You will get the same product at the same price, and we get nothing. That is a legitimate way to read this site, and it is why the product name is always written out in full rather than hidden behind a button.
  • Compare our description against the manufacturer’s own specification. Where a claim on this site conflicts with the maker’s published spec sheet, the spec sheet wins and we want to hear about it.
  • Read the one-star reviews on Amazon before you buy anything we recommend. They are the fastest way to find the failure mode we missed.

Advertising and consumer-protection rules

This disclosure exists because United States Federal Trade Commission guidance requires that a material connection between a publisher and a seller is disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation itself. That is why a short disclosure line appears on every page carrying product links, above the first link rather than at the bottom of the page, and why this longer page exists behind it.

It also exists because the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program Operating Agreement requires participants to state their participation. Both statements appear at the top of this page in the wording those rules expect.

If something here reads like an advert

Tell us. A page on this site that reads like marketing copy is a page that has failed, and we would rather rewrite it than defend it. Corrections about measurements, part numbers and species claims are the most useful mail we get — see the contact page.