Affiliate disclosure

SkyVerdict takes part in the Amazon Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising arrangement under which a site can earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.

What happens when you press a price button

Every "Check price on Amazon" button carries an affiliate tag. Follow one, buy the telescope or the eyepiece at the end of it, and a share of that sale comes back to us. Amazon charges you its own price: coming through this site adds nothing to it and takes nothing off it.

A click passes through this site before arriving at a store, because which store is the right one depends on where the page is being read. A reader in Italy is sent to amazon.it and one in Spain to amazon.es, each carrying the tag registered for that marketplace. The same reasoning puts rel="nofollow sponsored" on every such link: a link that can earn is an advertisement, and it is marked as one for anything that reads the page.

The direction the income leans, and what leans back

Commission is a share of the sale, so a large mount is worth many times what a planisphere is. That pull exists and is better named than denied. Three arrangements hold against it, and each of them can be inspected rather than taken on trust:

• Where a product sits in a family has nothing to do with what it earns. Nobody looks up what a reference pays while a family is being ordered, and no list has been rearranged afterwards because one entry turned out to pay better. Where the right answer is the least expensive thing on the page — or no purchase at all, as when a tube simply needs collimating — the page says that instead.
• A good number of the most confident recommendations here are cheap. A collimation tool, a red torch that goes properly dim, an observing chair: none of them earns much, and each can change more than an upgrade would. Neither price nor commission decides anything.
• Where an instrument has no confirmed offer on the Amazon store for your country, the button runs a search there instead of opening a listing that may have disappeared. That earns us less and costs you nothing.

Things that have never had a price

A position in a list, a paragraph, a kinder adjective: not one of them has ever been for sale here, and not one is for sale now. Nothing on the site is sponsored. A verdict does not move because a product goes out of stock or because a rival would pay more, since nothing in how the site is built can respond to what anything pays.

About the figures beside each instrument

The live figure beside an instrument is Amazon’s own recorded price for your market, cached briefly and then fetched again. This subject moves more than most: a telescope can sit at one price for months and then fall sharply for a single week before Christmas. Read any band written into a review as the bracket it is, and take the number Amazon shows at the moment you order as the only one that settles anything.