Affiliate disclosure

1. The arrangement, stated plainly

Innolope LLC, the operator of Fragnoir, participates in affiliate marketing programmes run by fragrance retailers and by the affiliate networks that administer them. When you follow an outbound link from Fragnoir to a retailer — the buttons labelled "Visit shop" in the price comparison, and any equivalent link elsewhere in the Service — and you subsequently buy something, the retailer pays us a commission calculated as a percentage of that sale. This commission is the primary source of revenue for the product and is what allows every feature of Fragnoir to be offered without a subscription, without advertising and without selling anyone's data.

2. What it costs you: nothing

The price you pay at the retailer is identical whether you arrived through Fragnoir or typed the shop's address into your browser yourself. Affiliate commission is paid out of the retailer's own marketing budget and margin; it is not a surcharge, it is not added at checkout, and it does not reduce any discount or promotion you would otherwise have received. If you ever find a case where a price reached through Fragnoir differs from the price reached directly, we would very much like to hear about it, because that would indicate a fault in our data or in a retailer's implementation rather than an intended feature of the arrangement.

3. How it works technically, and what is shared

An outbound link from Fragnoir passes through a redirect on our own domain before it forwards you to the retailer. That redirect does two things: it appends the tracking parameters that identify Fragnoir as the source of the visit, including a unique reference for that particular click, and it records the click on our side so that we can reconcile the commission statements our partners send us, understand which comparisons are actually useful, and detect fraudulent or automated clicking, which is a serious problem in affiliate marketing and one that can cause an account to be terminated.

The click record we keep is pseudonymous: it identifies the offer, the retailer and the click reference, not you as a named individual, and it is reduced to non-identifying aggregates after ninety days as described in our privacy policy. We do not transmit your name, your email address or any account information to the retailer or the network; what the retailer learns is that a visitor arrived from Fragnoir with a particular click reference, which is exactly what it needs in order to pay the commission and nothing more. Once you are on the retailer's site, that retailer's own cookies, analytics and privacy policy govern what happens next, and we have no visibility into it beyond eventually being told, in aggregate, that a sale attributed to that reference occurred.

4. The safeguards we hold ourselves to

Commission creates an incentive to steer you toward whichever shop pays best, and the only meaningful answer to that is a set of rules that we publish and can be held to. The price comparison is sorted by price, so the cheapest offer we know of is shown first, and the commission rate a retailer pays plays no part in that ordering — including in the case where the cheapest retailer pays us nothing at all, which does happen and which we treat as the ordinary cost of running an honest comparison. Retailers cannot pay for placement, for prominence, for inclusion in the catalogue, or for exclusion of a competitor.

Community ratings, reviews and note data are entirely separate from commercial relationships: no retailer or brand can alter, suppress or promote them, and no commercial partner has any role in moderation decisions. Editorial descriptions and recommendations are written without reference to what a link is worth. Every outbound purchase link is identifiable as such, is marked as a sponsored link in the underlying markup so that search engines are informed as required, and is accompanied by a visible disclosure in the interface next to the price table rather than being buried on this page alone.

5. Partners, jurisdictions and changes

We participate, or intend to participate as the catalogue expands, in affiliate programmes administered by networks including Awin, CJ Affiliate and Rakuten Advertising, covering fragrance retailers principally in the European market. The specific set of active partners changes over time as programmes are approved, renegotiated or ended, and we do not maintain a live list here for that reason; if you want to know whether a particular link is an affiliate link, the safe assumption is that any link to a shop is one.

This disclosure is made in the spirit of the guidance issued by consumer protection authorities in the European Union and by the United States Federal Trade Commission on the disclosure of material connections, and we would rather over-explain the arrangement than satisfy the minimum. If anything on this page is unclear, or if you believe we have fallen short of the commitments in section four, write to us at [email protected] and we will answer you properly. See also our terms of use, which make several of these commitments contractually binding.