We sell coffee, we take a cut when you buy gear through our links, we run ads, and sometimes companies mail us a grinder. Here's all of it, in plain English, with the awkward parts left in.
Some links on this site — particularly in our gear reviews and buying guides — are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, the retailer pays us a commission. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.
This is disclosed at the top of every page that contains affiliate links, above the first link, as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires. If you ever find an affiliate link on a page without that disclosure, that's a mistake on our part — email us and we'll fix it.
ShopCoffee 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.
We also use an affiliate network that automatically enables commissions on links to a wide range of retailers — grinder manufacturers, espresso equipment sellers, specialty roasters. We don't hand-pick which of those merchants pay us; the network handles it. That means we sometimes earn on a link we would have included regardless, and sometimes earn nothing on a product we recommend enthusiastically.
We sell coffee. We also review coffee subscriptions, several of which compete directly with ours. That is an enormous conflict of interest and pretending otherwise would insult everyone involved.
Here's how we handle it:
This is the part most affiliate sites lie about, so we'll be specific.
ShopCoffee is a small operation. We have not personally lab-tested every product we write about. We do not own a grind-distribution analyser. There is no basement lab, no wall of fifty espresso machines, no lab coat. When a site your size claims "we tested 47 grinders over 300 hours," what usually happened is somebody read the same spec sheets we did and then bought a stock photo of a clipboard.
What our recommendations are built on: manufacturer specifications, the technical consensus among people who do run controlled tests, long-run owner reports about what breaks and when, parts and repairability, and our own hands-on experience with the subset of this gear we actually own and use daily.
Every buying guide on this site carries a "How we picked" box saying which of those applies. Where we've used something ourselves, we say so. Where we're synthesizing other people's testing, we say that too. You can then weigh the advice accordingly.
We run Google AdSense on parts of this site. Those ads are served by Google and its partners, who may use cookies to show ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. You can opt out of personalized advertising via Google Ads Settings.
Ads are placed on our editorial and informational pages. We deliberately keep them off our product pages and off most gear-buying guides — partly because ad clicks and buying decisions compete for the same attention, and partly because a page plastered in ads is a worse page.
We accept product for review. A company sends us a grinder, we use it for weeks, we write what we think. Details and terms are on our Work With Us page.
Yes, this is a conflict. Free stuff makes people generous — that's not cynicism, it's a well-documented feature of being human, and anyone who says they're immune to it is the person you should trust least. So we handle it with rules rather than willpower:
As of today we haven't received any. When we have, this page will say so and the relevant guides will name which units were supplied.
We sell advertising, including sponsored units inside buying guides. When we do:
As of today, no brand has paid for anything on this site. When that changes, it'll be visible on the page it affects — you won't need this page to spot it.
If we ever advertise that buying our coffee benefits a named charity, that'll be backed by a signed written agreement with that charity, the state registrations required for commercial co-ventures, and a specific stated percentage per bag — never a vague "a portion of proceeds," which is the giving equivalent of "prices from."
We're making no such claim today, and nothing on sale carries a charitable commitment. We got this wrong once and wrote up what happened on the Coffee Cures page, including the part where it was our fault.
Genuinely — if something here reads as evasive, tell us and we'll rewrite it. hello@shopcoffee.com.
ShopCoffee is operated by Aegis, LLC (DBA "ShopCoffee"). Last updated: July 2026.