The plain version
Some of what we link to on PresentSphere uses an Amazon Associates affiliate tag. When you buy through one of those links, we earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and the page below tells you exactly which surfaces use the tag and which don’t.
Where we use affiliate links
We use the Amazon Associates affiliate tag in three places on PresentSphere:
- Gift-ideas posts. Every product pick on a post under our gift-ideas section uses an affiliate-tagged Amazon URL. These are the posts we wrote, with picks we chose; the editorial rules below apply to these and only these.
- Wishlist items with Amazon links. When someone in your circle adds a wishlist item whose URL points to Amazon, we attach an Amazon Associates tag to the URL so that when another family member clicks through to buy, Amazon can credit us for the referral. The original URL is preserved alongside the tagged one, and the in-app card carries a small inline “Affiliate” label so the people in your circle know which links are tagged.
- AI-suggested gifts inside the app. When our gift assistant suggests a category or a search idea for someone in a profile, the “View on Amazon” link on each suggestion is a tagged Amazon Associates search URL. The suggestions themselves are generated by the assistant; the tag is applied uniformly to every suggestion that surfaces an Amazon link.
All three surfaces carry a visible disclosure near where the affiliate links appear, in addition to this page.
Where we don’t
The Amazon Associates tag is never applied to:
- Reminder emails, digest emails, or any other email we send. Amazon’s program agreement prohibits affiliate links in email, SMS, or PDFs, and our outbound-click redirect strips the tag whenever the click originates from one of those channels.
- Our FAQ, About page, marketing landings, or any other informational page that isn’t under /gift-ideas.
- Anything that isn’t an Amazon URL. We don’t participate in any other affiliate program today; if that changes, this page changes first.
How we earn
PresentSphere is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a way for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
The commission per sale is a small percentage of the purchase price. Across a year, those small percentages help us keep PresentSphere free for families, pay for email reminders, and keep the app maintained without charging individual households a subscription.
Editorial rules on our posts
The rules below apply only to gift-ideas posts, the one surface where the picks are chosen by us rather than by you or by an algorithm. The fact that a pick earns us a commission has no effect on whether it appears in a post. We follow three rules that we wrote down before we wrote our first post:
- We only include a pick when we’d send it to someone we actually know. That filter eliminates the cheap-but-popular options most affiliate sites lead with.
- We keep posts short. Two to four picks, with one honest sentence per pick. No rankings, no superlatives, no “best of” ladders. A long list with twenty links is a content farm, not a recommendation.
- We disclose at the top of every post that lists affiliate links. The same disclosure repeats at the bottom so anyone arriving at a pick from a search snippet sees it at least once before they click out.
These rules don’t apply to wishlist items, because those are chosen by the family members who add them, and they don’t apply to AI suggestions, because those are generated algorithmically from each profile’s stated interests. Affiliate tagging on those two surfaces is uniform, not editorial.
Your cost
You pay the same price you would pay if you reached Amazon any other way. Amazon’s prices are the same for our affiliate links as they are for a direct visit. Our commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not yours.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or if you think we’ve broken one of our editorial rules on a specific post, please reach out. The fastest way is the contact link in our FAQ. We take editorial drift seriously, and we’d rather hear a complaint than wait for someone to notice quietly.
