Commercial
Disclosure
Who pays us, what that changes, and what it can never change.
We currently earn nothing from any link on this site.
We have no affiliate accounts, no retailer partnerships, no sponsored placements and no paid reviews. Every outbound link goes to a plain manufacturer or retailer URL with no tracking parameter attached. If you buy a cart today through a link on this site, we receive nothing.
This will probably change, and here is how you will know
A site like this is expensive to research properly, and affiliate commission is the most likely way we fund it. We would rather explain the mechanism now, while we have nothing to gain from it.
The notice at the bottom of every page carrying outbound links is generated from the same configuration file that builds the links themselves. It is not a hand-written paragraph someone might forget to update. A link cannot be tagged without the disclosure text changing at the same moment, on every page, because both read the same switch.
Current state of every retailer we link to
| Retailer | Affiliate status |
|---|---|
| Amazon | No relationship — untagged link |
| Railblaza | No relationship — untagged link |
| YakAttack | No relationship — untagged link |
| Wheeleez | No relationship — untagged link |
| Suspenz | No relationship — untagged link |
| REI | No relationship — untagged link |
| Austin Kayak | No relationship — untagged link |
Outbound links carry rel="nofollow noopener",
and will additionally carry sponsored
the moment any of them earn us money. Screen reader users are told in the link text itself whether a
link is an affiliate link.
The rules money does not get to touch
A commercial relationship can never move a safety verdict
This is the whole reason the site exists. The kayak cart category is full of affiliate roundups that recommend whatever pays best and describe carts they have never touched. If we ever do that, we are just another one of them.
- Rankings come out of the rules engine, which has no access to commercial data. Revenue is not an input to any verdict.
- A cart that exceeds your load, blocks on a known non-fit, or fails the scupper safety gate stays Not recommended no matter who sells it.
- Warnings are attached to records, not to brands. A cart we might earn from carries exactly the same warnings it carries today.
- We will never accept payment to remove or soften a warning, and we will say publicly if we are asked to.
- We do not accept free product in exchange for a review outcome. If we are ever loaned a cart to test, the loan will be disclosed on the record itself.
- No cart gets a placement it did not earn on fit, capacity and terrain.
Prices and availability
We show price bands rather than live prices, each stamped with the month we last checked. Live pricing goes stale within days and we are not willing to publish a number that implies a freshness we cannot maintain. Discontinued models stay in the database, clearly marked, because people still own them and still need to cart them.
Independence
We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any cart manufacturer, kayak manufacturer or retailer. Where a manufacturer’s own guidance contradicts our judgement, we publish both and say which is which — for instance Hobie’s position that cart damage to scuppers is not warranty covered is quoted as their statement, and our resulting blocking rule is labelled as our decision.