The plain-language version
Some links on OunceDesk are affiliate links. If you click one and make a purchase, the merchant may pay us a commission. This does not change the price you pay unless a specific offer explicitly says otherwise. Affiliate commissions are how an independent site with no paywall and no ads pays for itself.
What affiliate money never influences
Six hard rules, and they are load-bearing:
- Supply listings are ordered by fitment and archival safety from a dataset that contains no commission information. This one is a mechanism rather than a promise: in the Supply Room, what appears and in what order is computed from a data file holding no merchant, price or commission field at all, and merchant links are attached in a separate pass afterwards, to rows already in order. Where one product has several merchants, they are shown cheapest observed price first, ties alphabetically. Commission rate is not stored anywhere in the system and is not a sort key anywhere in it. A test in our build fails if a merchant field ever appears in the ordering data.
- Research conclusions. Our theses come from our models, published with their evidence and falsifiers. No merchant sees research before you do.
- Evidence classifications. OBSERVED / DERIVED / ESTIMATED / SPECULATIVE labels are set by methodology, not marketing.
- Dealer rankings. When our Deal Desk compares dealers, ordering is set by measured premium and availability — never by commission rate. A dealer who pays us nothing and has the best price ranks first.
- Premium calculations. The math is published and identical for every dealer.
- Market signals. Index scores like the Silver Stress Index are computed from market data with no commercial input.
How you can tell
Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" markup, commercial modules are visually labeled, and this page is linked from every page footer. If you ever find a place where commerce and analysis blur, tell us — hello@ouncedesk.com — and we'll fix the design, not the definition.
The relationships
We are applying to affiliate programs of major bullion dealers and collecting-equipment merchants. Active relationships will be listed here as they go live; none of the analysis you read today was funded by any of them.