How This Site Is Funded

The short version

Hull & Paddle 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. We earn commission on qualifying purchases made through our links, at no additional cost to you.

Every link on this site that can earn us money is marked. Buy buttons carry an #ad label and a link back to this page, and the links themselves carry rel="sponsored nofollow" so that search engines can see them for what they are.

What a commission is

If you click a buy button here and then purchase something, the retailer pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid arriving there any other way — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your pocket.

That is the entire business model. There is no subscription, no advertising, and nothing behind a paywall.

What we do not do

• Sponsored placements. No manufacturer has ever paid to appear on this site, and none can.
• Paid reviews. Nobody pays us to write about their product or to write about it favorably.
• Free products. We do not accept samples from manufacturers. Since we do not test anything, there would be nothing to do with them except create an obligation.
• Commission-led ranking. The order of every roundup is set by published specifications applied in a stated sequence. The sequence is published so you can check the ranking against it.

The place this could bias us, and what we do about it

The honest answer is that any affiliate site has an incentive to recommend buying something. Two structural things limit it here.

First, comparable rates. Commission across the categories we cover — kayaks, boards, paddles, life jackets — is broadly similar. That is why kayak or paddle board can be written honestly, and the page states the conflict explicitly rather than leaving you to infer it.

Second, we publish the cases where the answer is not to buy from us. Our verdict on warehouse-store boards is that they are usually fine and their return policy is better than ours. That page earns us nothing when we are right, and it is on the site because it is the true answer.

Prices

No price is typed into body copy anywhere on this site. Prices come from a live data layer, render inside the buy buttons, and carry the date they were checked.

When the layer has nothing fresh, the button reads “check price” and shows no number at all. That is deliberate: retail prices move constantly, and a stale figure is a false claim about what something costs.

The /go links

Buy buttons point at a /go/ address on this domain, which redirects to the retailer. That exists so a destination can be changed in one configuration file if we ever join a different affiliate program, without rewriting any content. Those addresses are excluded from search indexing and carry no content of their own.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks commercially motivated, tell us: info@hullandpaddle.com or the contact form. See also our editorial policy and how we pick.

Hull & Paddle is published by Slate Mill Group.