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Shelf Gift

Editorial policy

Editorial policy

The rules this site is written under: what we source, what we will not claim, how corrections work, and what happens when commercial interest and editorial judgment disagree.

Quiet library shelves receding into the distance
The four rules everything else follows from: every figure carries a source and a date. We do not claim experience we have not had. Commercial interest never changes a rank order. And corrections are made openly, on the page, with a note that they were made.

1. Sourcing

Every specification on this site is attributed. Each spec cell shows whether the figure came from the seller’s product title, a feature bullet on their listing, the manufacturer’s own published material, or a primary source such as a standards or government body — and the date the source was read.

Where a seller does not publish something, the cell reads Not published. We do not fill it with a plausible figure, an industry typical value, or a number from a competing product. That blank is itself a finding and it is scored as one.

For anything outside our competence — eye strain, book preservation, light and sleep — we cite published guidance from bodies that hold the relevant expertise and link to it, so a reader can check the claim against the source rather than against us.

2. Claims we will not make

This is the list, and it is absolute:

  • No testing claims. We have not used, held or owned any product on this site. The phrases “we tested”, “hands-on”, “in our testing” and “after N hours of use” do not appear here.
  • No invented credentials. No expert panel, no medically reviewed by, no professional qualification the author does not hold, and no claims about years of experience.
  • No fabricated reviews or testimonials. This site publishes none at all. It has no customers, and inventing some would be the fastest way to deserve nobody’s trust.
  • No first-party product ratings in structured data. The visible gift-fit score is ordinary editorial content. It never appears as review or rating markup, because marking an editorial score up as a product rating would be a structured-data violation and would contradict this site’s own copy.
  • No medical claims. No product here treats, helps or is designed for any condition, and nothing on this site is medical advice.
  • No manufactured urgency. No countdowns, no “limited time”, no “best price guaranteed”.
  • No prices except from the live feed. See the disclosure.

3. Independence

Shelf Gift is funded by Amazon Associates commissions. That relationship is disclosed on its own page, in a line above the first affiliate link on every commercial page, and with an #ad marker on every buy button.

No brand pays for placement here, has editorial input, or sees a page before it publishes. No brand has sent us a product. Commission rate is not one of the five components of the score and cannot become one — the components are published on the methodology page and any change to them would be a change to that page.

Where a product we recommend against is one we could earn on, we recommend against it anyway and say why. That is the only test of a policy like this one that means anything.

4. Corrections

Listings change. A seller who published a runtime last month may not publish it next month, and a figure we quoted accurately can become wrong through nobody’s fault. Every figure on this site carries the date it was read for exactly that reason.

If something here is wrong, tell us. The contact form has a correction option, and info@shelfgift.com reaches the same inbox. Corrections go to the top of the list.

When we correct something material — a wrong figure, a wrong compatibility claim, a recommendation that should not have stood — we change it and note on the page that it was corrected and when. We do not quietly edit and move on. Typos and clarity edits are made without a note.

5. Update cadence

Every page carries a published date and a last-updated date, and both are real. They are stored per document and are never set to the build timestamp, which is why our sitemap shows pages with genuinely different modification dates rather than all of them changing whenever the site is redeployed.

Product listings are re-read when a page is materially revised. Product photography and, when it is running, pricing come from a live retailer feed that refreshes independently of the editorial content — so a price updating does not change a page’s last-updated date, and it should not.

On AI. Pages on this site are drafted with AI assistance and every factual claim in them is tied to a source we can point at — which is the reason the sourcing rule in section 1 is as strict as it is. What is not AI-generated is the data: the specifications come from reading real listings, and no figure anywhere on this site was produced by asking a model what it remembered.

6. Accessibility and reading experience

Color pairings on this site are checked against WCAG AA contrast ratios rather than by eye, focus outlines are never removed, tables scroll rather than compress on narrow screens, and there are no scroll effects, autoplaying media or motion animations anywhere. If you find something on this site that is hard to use, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.

Who is responsible

Scooter M. writes and is responsible for everything published here. Shelf Gift is published by Slate Mill Group. More about both.