Blog 001
The “best” shipping agent is the one paying them the most.
Affiliate links are fine. We mean that. Calling yourself a neutral comparison while you run them is not. Here it is, on their own website.
You want to know which agent ships cheapest.
So you find a shipping calculator. You put in your country and your weight. You get a list with prices on it.
It looks like a scoreboard. It reads like a scoreboard. Somebody measured, and this one won.
That is not what you are looking at.
Think about a car lot
You walk onto a car lot and ask the guy which car is the best deal.
He is not going to tell you the best car.
He is going to tell you the car he makes the most commission on. And he is going to call it the best car.
Maybe it is even a decent car. That is not the point. The point is you asked a question and the answer you got was about his money, not yours.
Now put that guy in charge of a price comparison website.
How they actually get paid
You look up the cheapest way to ship your parcel.
You click an agent on their list.
That link carries a code that says we sent this person.
We followed one. It ends at invite_code=JADESHIP.
The agent pays them a cut of your shipping. Not once — for as long as you keep shipping.
Nothing there is a scam. Somebody has to pay for the website. It was never going to be you, so it is the agents.
It stops being fine the moment you call it a comparison.
Because a comparison is a promise: I checked these, and this one won. That promise is the only reason anybody reads one.
Affiliate links are fine. Seriously.
We want to be clear, because people get this part wrong.
There is nothing wrong with affiliate links. If you run them and call your site a list of shipping agents, go make your money. Nobody is mad at you.
We mean that enough that we are writing the guide to it.
A comparison is a different thing. A comparison is a promise.
It says: I checked these, and this one won. That is the only reason anybody reads one.
You can run affiliate links. You can run a comparison. You cannot do both and call it neutral.
They call themselves a neutral party
Their words. Not ours. It is in a headline box on the calculator page:
“As a neutral party we do everything to level the playing field and make prices comparable.”
jadeship.com/shipping-calculator
Now scroll to the bottom of that exact same page.
The red box, blown up — because at real size you were never going to read it
Actual size on the page: the letters are ten pixels tall, grey, italic, sitting under the copyright notice. The rest of that paragraph says the paid links are marked with “ship”, “… sign-up” or a rocket symbol, and that the commission is on the shipping rather than on the item.
You were told. At the bottom. In the fine print.
“All shopping agent links are affiliate links.”
That is every route out of the comparison and into an agent.
They did not lie to you. They wrote it down. They put it in ten-pixel grey italic, under the copyright notice, next to the logo credits, seven hundred pixels below the prices you actually came for.
Hidden in the fine print is still hidden.
And the way you are supposed to spot a paid link, according to that same paragraph? A rocket symbol.
Nobody even checked the prices
Same fine print. Two paragraphs up.
“This is a graphical presentation of statistical data, provided directly by a third party (‘shopping agent’) … This page is made for educational purposes only. The data is not vetted, influenced or produced by JadeShip.com.”
jadeship.com/shipping-calculator — page footer
Read that again, slowly.
The agents send them the prices.
They do not check them.
They put them in a table.
They get paid when you pick one.
And the box at the top of that page says neutral party.
“Trusted agents”
They have a page for the agents they will vouch for. Twenty-three logos on it.
It calls them trusted agents. Then, right underneath, it explains what trusted means.
Trusted means paying.
And then there is the front door
We pressed it and followed where it went.
jadeship.com/l/lovegobuy
→ lovegobuy.com/login/signup?invite_code=JADESHIPThat is not a comparison result. That is an ad.
Other sites are not incentivised to rank the best shipping agent. They are incentivised to rank the shipping agent that pays them the most.
So what do we do instead
Nobody pays us. No ads, no affiliate links, no referral codes, no sponsored rows. Nothing on this site is for sale, so please do not email asking to buy it.
We make exactly the same money whichever agent you pick. Zero.
But “trust me bro, we are neutral” is worth nothing. You just watched a website say that about itself.
So we do not ask you to trust us.
Nobody hands us prices. We open each agent’s own calculator in a real browser. Same country, same weight, same box, every time — because two prices for two different parcels is not a comparison, it is a coincidence. We write down what the screen said, and we keep the recording and the time it was taken.
You do not have to believe us. You can watch the tape.
When we cannot get a price, we say we cannot get a price. We do not guess, and we do not publish a coupon like it is a rate.
Hold us to this
We expect to come out near the top of our own board. You should be suspicious of that. Good. Be suspicious.
Here is the standard. It is the same one we just used on somebody else:
Show the inputs. Show the recording. Say what you do not know.
The day we take a dollar from a company on this board, that paragraph is a lie and this site is worthless. That is not a rule we follow. That is the product.
You can buy a banner. You can buy a spot on a list. You cannot buy a recording of what your competitor’s own calculator said, at the moment it said it.