How this site is funded

The Wax Index 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.

If you buy something through a link on this site, we receive a percentage of the sale. It costs you nothing extra - the price is the same whether you use our link or go to the retailer directly.

That is the entire business model. We sell no wax and no warmers, we run no ads, we take no sponsorship, and we have no other revenue.

Every commercial link on this site points at /go/<merchant> rather than directly at a retailer. That route looks up the merchant, adds our tracking tag, and forwards you on. It is marked noindex, nofollow, it is blocked in our robots.txt, and it never appears in the sitemap.

Two reasons for the indirection, and neither is about hiding anything. It means a change of program is a one-line configuration change rather than a rewrite of every page - so if we join a better program for a brand later, you get the better link without us touching the content. And it lets us count buy-clicks in analytics, which is the only per-site performance signal available to us.

Every outbound commercial link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" and opens in a new tab. Every buy button names the retailer it goes to, so you know where you are being sent before you click.

Links to sources - the NFPA, Pet Poison Helpline, VCA, manufacturer documentation - are not affiliate links and are not cloaked. We earn nothing from those and they go straight to the source.

A new site has joined nothing yet, and rather than imply otherwise here is the complete current state:

Our Amazon Associates tracking ID is thewaxindex-20. If you want to check whether a link is ours, that is what to look for in the URL.

It would be easy to write "commission never influences our picks" and move on. Here is the checkable version instead - three places on this site where commission would have pushed the other way:

• Several products are ranked below where they could be purely because their maker publishes no wattage or no hours figure. Documentation is a ranking criterion, and a well-documented product frequently beats a better-selling one.
• We recommend no tealight burner anywhere on this site. They are cheap, popular and easy to sell. They also have an open flame, which is the exact thing most of our readers are trying to avoid.
• Every roundup names something it does not recommend, and says why. A list where everything is great is a list nobody believes, and it is also a list that earns less because it is less useful.

Where a product we rate has no verified buy path, we say so and link nothing rather than sending you somewhere we have not checked. Where we have no live price, the button says "Check price" rather than showing an old number.

The full ranking criteria, and what would change our mind, are on the methodology page.

On every page carrying a commercial link, above the fold and before the first such link - not only here and not only in the footer. Every buy button also carries an #ad marker and a link back to this page, including when there is no price to show.

That is more disclosure than the FTC minimum. It is there because a reader who discovers the commercial relationship late feels misled even when nothing was hidden, and this site does not have anything else to trade on.

If anything here is unclear, or you think a link is doing something we have not described, email info@thewaxindex.com or use the contact form.

The Wax Index is published by Slate Mill Group.