If you've used other comparison or referral sites, you've seen cashback offers: click through, buy, get a few dollars back. It's a model that's worked for decades, and on the surface it looks like a clean way to share the affiliate commission with the shopper. ShopForTerra deliberately doesn't offer cashback, and the reasons go beyond personal preference — they shape what you read on this site.
The affiliate terms are clear
The networks we participate in — Awin, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten Advertising, Impact, Amazon Associates — all have terms that prohibit paying users a per-click incentive. These programs compensate publishers for legitimate referrals; they don't fund a parallel cashback economy. A site that pays users to click risks losing its merchant relationships entirely.
That's a legal constraint, not a creative one. Offering cashback would put us one audit away from losing the whole model — and the donations along with it.
Incentives distort recommendations
The second reason matters more than the legal one. Cashback creates a quiet, persistent incentive for a site to recommend the products that pay the most, not the products that are best for the shopper.
When a publisher keeps 100 percent of the commission and donates a fixed share to charity, that incentive mostly disappears. There's no per-click bonus to chase. The recommendation is judged on one question: is this product a good fit for someone trying to make their home more energy-efficient?
This is also why the donation share is set as company policy rather than a per-purchase pledge. Per-purchase pledges — 'we'll donate $1 for every purchase' — sound friendly, but they tie the donation to specific commerce events and create exactly the cashback-style distortion we want to avoid. A fixed, policy-level commitment applied to whatever revenue we earn keeps the recommendation and donation stories separate.
What we offer instead of cashback
We don't share affiliate commissions back to shoppers, but we try to give you what cashback sites can't: tools and information that genuinely help you save money on a home upgrade. A good solar or insulation decision can return hundreds or thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the equipment — far more than a 3-percent cashback offer will ever add up to.
Use our solar calculator, our insulation calculator, and the buying guides throughout our Learn section to figure out what's right for your home. The donation side of the model takes care of itself as a byproduct.
A fair objection
It's worth pointing out that not offering cashback means the shopper pays the same price here as anywhere else, while we keep the affiliate commission. That's true, and we don't pretend otherwise. The model only works because enough shoppers prefer that a share of the marketing money already baked into retail prices go to environmental work rather than to a publisher's profit line.
If you'd rather have the cashback, the cashback sites will happily give it to you. We're not trying to be the right site for every shopper — just for the ones who'd rather the slice go somewhere useful.