Affiliate disclosure

What an affiliate link is

Most retailers run an affiliate program: when a site (like DealHive) sends a buyer to them and that buyer makes a purchase, the retailer pays the referring site a small commission. The buyer pays exactly the same price as they would have from a direct retailer search - the commission comes out of the retailer's marketing budget, not the buyer's pocket.

How DealHive uses them

We attach an affiliate URL to a deal only when:

• The deal is genuine and editorially worth featuring on its own merits.
• The retailer has a public affiliate program (Commission Factory, Awin, Amazon Associates AU, Impact, etc.) that we have signed up to.
• The affiliate URL routes the user to the same product page the clean retailer URL would - no detours, no extra steps, no different price.

Every deal where the click is routed through an affiliate URL is labelled with a “Commission link” chip near the “Go to deal” button on both the homepage card and the deal detail page. The chip links back here so the disclosure is one click away at the moment of the click.

Editorial firewall

Affiliate commission does not influence which deals get featured, how they get ranked, or how moderation decisions get made. This is structurally enforced, not just a promise:

• The popularity engine (which deals graduate to the “Popular” tab, which earn an “Editor's Choice” badge) runs on quality + engagement signals only. It has no access to affiliate-revenue data.
• Feed sort orders (Hot, New, Top) use heat score + recency + votes. No affiliate boost.
• The AI moderation layer reviews submissions for safety + quality without any visibility into whether a deal carries an affiliate URL.
• The scraper (Forager) picks deals based on detection signals from source feeds. It has no per-retailer commercial preference.

Who sets the affiliate URL

Only DealHive's editorial team can attach an affiliate URL to a deal. Users who submit a deal cannot include their own affiliate code - our link-cleaner strips affiliate parameters and rejects known affiliate redirector hosts at submission time, so user-submitted deals always start as clean retailer links. If you spot a deal where you think the affiliate attribution is wrong (e.g. it should credit the original submitter rather than DealHive), let us know via the contact form.

Third-party affiliate chains

Some deals on DealHive link to a post on a third-party community deals site (such as OzBargain) rather than directly to the retailer. If that third-party page itself contains affiliate links, the commission goes to that site, not to DealHive. We follow the third-party's linking convention because their community curated the original post - the credit and the revenue go to them. We disclose this here so the click chain is transparent.

Bypass options

If you'd rather not contribute commission to DealHive on a particular purchase, you have two options:

• Search the retailer directly. Open a new tab, type the retailer's URL, and search for the product. You'll get the same price.
• Right-click the “Commission link” chip instead of the “Go to deal” button - the chip itself goes here (to this page), not to the retailer, so you can read the disclosure without triggering an affiliate click.

What we do with click data

When you click any deal (affiliate or not), we record a deduped click for the deal's popularity counter. Affiliate clicks additionally carry awas_affiliateflag in the click record so we can measure the program internally. This data is admin-only, retained per our privacy policy, and never shared with the retailer beyond the standard affiliate-program click attribution that the network handles automatically.

Tax and regulatory

Affiliate income earned by DealHive is treated as ordinary Australian business revenue and reported accordingly. This disclosure is provided to satisfy our obligations under the Australian Consumer Law (sections 18 and 29 - misleading or deceptive conduct, false or misleading representations) and ACCC guidance on the disclosure of material connections between recommendation channels and the products they recommend.

Questions or complaints

If you think a specific deal's disclosure is unclear, if you suspect the editorial firewall has been crossed, or if you just want to ask how it all works, the contact form reaches the editorial team directly. We take this stuff seriously - the disclosure boundary is the whole reason the site is worth trusting.