Affiliate disclosure

The short version

Chainring Club earns a commission when you buy something through a link on this site. It costs you nothing extra. It never decides what we recommend.

That’s the whole thing. Everything below is detail for anyone who wants to check it.

The Amazon Associates bit

Chainring Club 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.

Our Associates tag is chainringclub-20. If you click a product link here, that tag travels with you and tells Amazon we sent you. You pay the same price you would have paid walking in the front door.

How the links actually work

Every product link on this site points at our own /go/address rather than straight at a retailer. That’s not obfuscation — it’s so we have one place to change where a product points if a better option for you appears, without rewriting an article. The redirect fires, the tag is attached, you land on the product page.

Every earning link is marked up as sponsored for search engines, and opens in a new tab. We don’t hide which links pay us: if it goes to a shop, assume it pays us, and assume we’d rather tell you that than have you find out.

Amazon, and why almost everything here points there

Right now, Amazon is the only retailer we have an affiliate relationship with. That is worth stating plainly rather than implying a broad network we don’t have.

It has a real consequence for what you read here, and we’d rather you hear it from us: some well-known bike brands don’t sell on Amazon at all.Where that matters — and on e-bikes it matters a lot — we say so on the page instead of quietly pretending the brand doesn’t exist. A roundup that omits the obvious contender without explaining why is a roundup that’s lying by omission.

Where we mention a brand or a shop we earn nothing from — Shimano, SRAM, Park Tool, Zero Friction Cycling and others — those links are plain, untracked references. They earn us nothing and are there because they’re the source.

One of those deserves spelling out, because it cuts the other way. Zero Friction Cycling publishes the chain-wear data much of our workshop content rests on, and it also sells chains and lubricants — including products that do well in its own results. We earn nothing from ZFC and have no relationship with it, but its commercial interest in its own findings is exactly the kind of thing this page exists to surface. We disclose it at every citation and we never call that data “independent”, which is what the rest of the category calls it. The reasoning is on how we research.

What the commission does not buy

• It doesn’t buy a ranking.Commission rates vary by category and we don’t look at them when ordering a list. The proof is structural: every roundup here names at least one product to skip, and our rankings routinely put cheap things above expensive things, which is the opposite of what a commission-maximising site does.
• It doesn’t buy a placement.We accept no sponsored posts, paid inclusions, or “partnerships”. No brand has ever paid to appear here and none will.
• It doesn’t buy a free product.We accept no review samples. This is an easy promise for us to keep — nobody sends free bikes to a site that admits it doesn’t test them — but it’s a real one.

About the prices

Prices come live from Amazon’s API and were last verified Jul 17, 2026. They change constantly, and the price you see when you arrive at Amazon is the one that counts — not the one on our page.

If our data goes more than 48hours without a refresh, every price on this site disappears on its own and the buttons fall back to “Check price on Amazon”. We never type a price into an article, and we never show you one we can’t stand behind. More on that in how we research.

Questions

If any of this is unclear, or you think we’ve slipped, email info@chainringclub.com. See also our editorial policy.