How we make money

The Intimacy Edit is funded by the stores it links to. This page explains exactly what that means, in plain terms.

Who runs the stores

The stores this site routes to — one in the UAE, one in Oman, one in Saudi Arabia — are run by the same team as this site. Following a store link takes you to a shop we operate, not to an unrelated retailer we happen to recommend.

What we are paid

The retail margin on the order. No third party pays us a commission for sending a visitor, and no advertiser pays for placement, because there is no third party in the transaction.

How you can tell

• Store links are marked rel="sponsored" in the page code, as search engines expect for commercial outbound links.
• Commerce modules on an article are labelled with a line reading "A store we operate. Prices, delivery and packaging are ours, not a third party's."
• Outbound links to public health resources are not commercial links and carry no revenue.

What the money does not buy

• Placement. No supplier can pay to appear in an article, in a module, or higher in a list.
• Favourable wording. No supplier reviews copy before publication.
• Retention. A page that stops being useful is rewritten or removed, whatever it earns.
• Silence. A negative finding about a product stays in the article. If we drop a product line, existing articles are updated, not quietly deleted.

Why we only link to a few stores

Each market in this site — the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia — routes to one store, not to a list of every shop that would take a link. The reason is accuracy: delivery terms, packaging policies and payment options are country-specific, and a store that is right for Dubai is not necessarily right for Muscat. Where a store in a market has not opened yet, we link to nothing and say so.

The code we publish

Some stores offer a first-order discount code to readers arriving from this site. Where that exists, the code is printed in the commerce module. We do not invent discounts, and we state the code only where it has been confirmed.

Questions

If something here is unclear, or you think a link is in the wrong place, write to editor@theintimacyedit.com. We would rather fix it than defend it.

This disclosure exists because consumer protection rules in the markets we serve require a trader to be identifiable before a purchase, and because a site that hides who it is selling for has not earned the reader's trust.