Affiliate Disclosure
How this site makes money, stated plainly and in one place.
The short version
Ply & Pan earns a commission on qualifying purchases made through links on this site, as an Amazon Associate. It costs you nothing extra. It is the entire business model.
What we accept
- Affiliate commission from Amazon on qualifying purchases made through links here.
That is the complete list.
What we refuse
- Free product from manufacturers. We do not accept samples, loans or review units. Nothing on this site was given to us by a brand.
- Sponsorship and paid placement. No brand has ever paid to appear here, to rank here, or to be described in a particular way, and none can.
- Paid links and link exchanges. Every outbound citation on this site is there because it supports a claim.
- Affiliate programs we have not joined. We only build tracked links for programs we are actually part of. Today that means Amazon and nothing else.
Those refusals are structural rather than aspirational: they are the basis for describing this site as independent, and if any of them ever changed, this page would change first and the change would be dated.
How links work here
Product links route through a redirect on this domain — you will see a /go/ address briefly — which applies our Amazon Associates tag and sends you to the retailer. It exists so that if we ever need to change a destination, we can do it in one place rather than editing hundreds of pages.
Every earning link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and carries a visible #ad label. Citations to manufacturer specifications and published testing are ordinary followed links, because they are references rather than advertising.
Why we do not print prices
Prices change weekly, and a printed price is wrong within a month. Rather than print a number that will decay, every buy link goes to the live listing so you see today's price at the retailer. Where a price appears anywhere on this site it will be dated and will disappear automatically once it is more than two days old.
Does commission influence what we recommend?
It is a fair question and the honest answer is that the incentive exists. Commission scales with price, which means we make more when you buy an expensive pan. Any affiliate site telling you the incentive does not exist is not being straight with you.
What we do about it is the only thing that is worth anything: we recommend the cheaper pan where the cheaper pan is the right answer, in writing, on the pages where it costs us. The clearest example is All-Clad vs Tramontina, where we argue that a large number of readers should buy the pan that pays us roughly a third as much. The same argument appears in buy-it-for-life cookware and in best budget skillets.
You do not have to take that on trust. Read those pages and judge whether the reasoning holds up.
Ranking is not for sale
Positions in our roundups are decided by the criteria set out on how we evaluate — construction, published durability evidence, oven rating, warranty terms, materials, cooking behavior, handling, and cost per year of service. Commission rate is not one of them and is not considered.
Amazon Associates statement
Ply & Pan 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.
Other retailers
At present Amazon is the only retailer we earn from. Where we link to a manufacturer's own site — for a specification page or a warranty document — that is a citation and we earn nothing from it. If we join another affiliate program in future, this page will say so and those links will be labeled the same way.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site looks commercially motivated, write and say so: contact@plyandpan.com, or use the contact form. We would rather have the argument than the benefit of the doubt.