How the ink dries

Method before merch.

Every shortlist label on this site has to survive a simple test: can a stranger reconstruct why the item is here from public, citable facts? If the answer is no, the item does not get a number dressed up as science.

What we log

• Manufacturer specifications — volume, weight, battery hours, materials, warranty names — taken from brand product pages or official spec sheets.
• Price ranges — a low/high USD band observed on the maker’s shop or a clearly labeled regional shop, dated on the plate. Street prices move. We do not treat a screenshot as eternal truth.
• Still-sold check — if a maker marks a bag discontinued in favor of a successor, we log the current plate (and mention the predecessor only as history).

What a ranking label means

Editors’ shortlist — weight + packability + warranty research means we compared published grams or pounds, whether the bag is sized against common carry-on templates the maker itself claims, and whether a written warranty or repair program exists. It is not a five-star mean.

If we cannot live-verify a rating (lab scores, Amazon averages, “8,412 reviews”), we omit it. Outdoor Gear Lab and Wirecutter publish their own tests; we link the idea of methodology, not their scores.

What we never invent

• Star averages, NPS, or “9.4/10 editorial scores.”
• User testimonials and fake names.
• Review counts, “bestseller” ranks, or award badges we did not earn.

Affiliate honesty

Buy buttons go to Amazon with our Associates tag. The tag lives in one constant — AMAZON_ASSOCIATE_TAG in src/data/affiliates.ts — so it is trivial to swap later. Product plates prefer a verified ASIN deep link (https://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/?tag=…); otherwise they use an Amazon search URL for the product name. Every affiliate link uses rel="sponsored noopener noreferrer".

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. That sentence is also in the footer on every page. “Buy direct” is a clean outbound to the manufacturer when we have a product page — no affiliate required.

How a research agent should update this site

Edit Markdown in /src/content. Do not change a spec without a source URL in the same commit. Bump the updated date. Rebuild. That is the whole pipeline.