Editorial Policy

What this site is

CEDAR BUY is a product-decision site. It helps you narrow a category down to a shortlist you can defend, using live Amazon listings plus comparison and decision tools of our own. It is not a review site: we do not receive products, and we do not test them.

We do not test products

This is the most important sentence on this page, so it gets its own section. Nobody here has physically handled the products this site shows you. There is no lab, no test bench, no sample unit, and no reviewer scoring anything by hand. Any site that shows you thousands of live listings across dozens of categories cannot have tested them, and we are not going to imply otherwise.

What we can honestly offer instead is structure: the specifications manufacturers publish, the data Amazon returns for a listing right now, and a consistent, explainable way of comparing them. Where a claim would need hands-on testing to make — how a laptop keyboard feels, whether a blender is loud, how a jacket wears after a season — this site does not make it.

How products are chosen

Products come from live searches against Amazon's catalogue for the category, subcategory or search terms you chose. Nobody pays to appear, nobody pays to rank higher, and results are not ordered by which category pays the most commission.

Where you see a Match percentage, it is a weighted average of signals we can actually read from the listing and from what you asked for:

• whether the product is really in the category and subcategory you are browsing;
• how well it meets the criteria that matter in that category;
• how its published specifications compare with the ones you filtered on;
• whether it is actually available to buy;
• how it sits against your price range, and how fresh that price reading is;
• whether Amazon's own data currently shows a genuine discount.

Three rules keep that number honest. Missing data is recorded as missing, never scored as zero, so a product is not punished for a specification the listing simply does not state. If fewer than three signals are actually available for a product, no percentage is shown at all. And a Match percentage only appears once you have told the site something real to match against — on a plain category browse with no filters, there is nothing to be a match for, so no number is shown.

The same calculation runs for everyone. Given the same product, the same filters and the same data, it returns the same score every time; there is no randomisation and no rotation to make results look fresh.

Where AI is used — and where it is not

Cedar AI is a clearly-labelled assistant you have to open deliberately. It helps you describe what you need and talks through the trade-offs. Its output is labelled as AI-generated wherever it appears.

Everything else on this site is ordinary software. Ranking, Match percentages, "Why this matches", related and alternative products, the comparison table's verdicts, For You, and Help Me Choose are all deterministic calculations running on this server: no language model scores products, orders results or decides what you see in them. Cedar AI is the one exception, and only when you use it: your request and the Amazon product details for the results it discusses are sent to the configured AI provider so it can write its answer. That information is not used to train any model.

Articles and buying guides are written and edited by people. We do not mass-generate pages, and we do not publish machine-written text as if a person wrote it.

How product data works

Every product on this site is an Amazon listing retrieved through Amazon's Creators API. Nothing is typed in by hand, imported from a spreadsheet, or copied from another site. If Amazon does not return a field, this site shows nothing for it rather than filling the gap.

Responses are cached briefly so that opening the same category twice does not make two identical requests. Prices are normally refreshed within a few minutes; if Amazon is briefly unreachable, a reading up to about an hour old can be shown. Either way the time of the reading is shown next to the price, and no copy is ever kept longer than 24 hours.

What this site does NOT do is keep a permanent copy of Amazon product information. When you save a product, only its Amazon identifier is stored against your account — not its title, price, image, description, specifications or availability. Opening your saved list fetches all of that again, live, so you never see a saved price that stopped being true months ago. Product images are served from Amazon rather than copied onto this server.

Specifications are the ones the manufacturer published to the listing. They are grouped and compared consistently across products in the same category, but they are not verified by us — see the section above on not testing products.

Prices and availability

Certain content that appears on this site comes from Amazon. This content is provided "as is" and is subject to change or removal at any time.

Prices move constantly. This site shows the price Amazon returned when the listing was last fetched, with the time of that reading next to it, and treats a reading older than fifteen minutes as stale when scoring. Amazon's own product page at the moment of purchase is always the authority — if the two disagree, Amazon is right and we are out of date.

How buying guides are written

A Cedar Buy buying guide exists to explain a decision, not to list products. Each one sets out what actually matters in that category, which criteria to weigh against each other, the mistakes that are expensive to make, and who should prioritise what. Products appear inside a guide as live listings pulled at the moment you read it — never as prices or descriptions frozen into the article text months ago.

We do not copy or reword Amazon product descriptions, and we do not publish near-identical guides to catch keyword variations. If a guide has nothing to add beyond what the listing already says, it does not get published.

Authors, dates and updates

Every article and guide shows the real WordPress account that wrote it, the date it was published and, when it has been revised since, the date it was last updated. An author biography is shown only when that person has actually written one; we do not generate biographies, credentials or job titles.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to fix it rather than quietly leave it up. Tell us what is wrong and where, and we will check it against the source.

• A factual error in an article or guide is corrected in place, and the updated date on the page changes to reflect that.
• A correction that changes the recommendation itself is noted in the article, not silently swapped.
• A wrong price or availability reading is usually a stale cache rather than an editorial error, and generally resolves itself within minutes; tell us anyway if it persists.

Report a correction →

How this site makes money

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Read the full Affiliate Disclosure →

Who to contact

Questions about this policy, a correction, or anything else on the site: use the details below.