How this site makes money
Plainly, because you should be able to judge the advice with the incentive in view.
The short version
Some links on this site earn a commission if you sell metal through them. You never pay more, and the price you are offered is not affected by arriving through a link here. Where a link pays commission it is labeled at the point of use, not only on this page.
What kind of commission
Mostly a percentage of the transaction, paid by the buyer, calculated on what you are paid. That structure means the commission rises when your payout rises. It is a better alignment than a flat referral fee, and it is still an incentive, which is why the methodology is published in full.
Rates differ by what is sold. Scrap silver, scrap gold, bullion, coins and consignment items all carry different percentages, and those differences are not permitted to determine what the pages recommend. Where the right answer earns nothing, the pages say so anyway.
What is never done here
No buyer pays for placement, for a review, or for a better position. There is no arrangement under which money changes an ordering.
No fabricated testimonials or invented reviews. If quoted praise appears on this site, a real person said it and the source is named. Where there is nothing real to quote, nothing is quoted.
No gold IRA or precious metals retirement products. That market pays by far the most and carries the worst regulatory record in the sector, and it has no business being promoted to someone selling inherited cutlery.
No links to buyers who charge sellers for returning declined goods, or whose quotes routinely fall once they hold your metal.
Advertising and data
This site may display advertising. Advertisers have no involvement in editorial content and no advance sight of it. Where analytics are used, they measure aggregate traffic; this site does not sell personal information, and it does not want your metal, your inventory or your contact details for any purpose beyond answering a message you chose to send.
Not advice
Everything here is general information about selling physical precious metals. It is not investment advice, it is not tax advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or hold anything. Tax treatment of a sale depends on where you live and what you paid, and it changes; ask an accountant before a significant transaction. If you want advice about precious metals as an investment, speak to someone licensed to give it.
How much money this actually is
Worth being blunt, because "we may earn a commission" is vague enough to hide almost anything. Affiliate commissions on this kind of site are small and irregular. They do not fund a team, they do not fund the author's living, and no single merchant represents a share of income large enough that losing them would change what gets published. That is not a virtue, it is just the arithmetic of a niche information site, and it is the honest answer to the question a reader is entitled to ask.
The practical consequence is the one that matters to you: there is no commercial pressure here to push you toward the buyer who pays the best commission rather than the one who pays you the most. If those two ever pointed in different directions, the page would say so out loud.
Why an ex-buyer taking commissions is a fair question
Somebody who spent eighteen years buying metal from the public, now recommending where to sell it and earning a fee when you do, is exactly the kind of arrangement a careful reader should be suspicious of. The suspicion is reasonable and worth answering directly.
Two things make it work. The business is closed, so there is no lot being steered toward anyone connected to the author, and no back channel through which your metal ends up somewhere it should not. And the ranking method is published: what is measured, what disqualifies a buyer, and what is deliberately not measured. A published method can be checked against what you actually find, and a reader who catches it failing has something concrete to report rather than a hunch.
The strongest test is the one you can run yourself. Take a buyer this site rates well, get a real quote, and compare it against the melt arithmetic on the valuation page. If the recommendation does not survive that, it deserves to be reported and corrected.
What a commission cannot buy
It cannot buy a position in a ranking, because ranking is decided before commercial terms are looked at. It cannot buy the removal of a criticism: where a buyer that pays commission has a real drawback, the drawback stays on the page. It cannot buy silence about a better option, including options that pay nothing at all, which is why local coin dealers and private sales appear on this site despite earning it nothing. And it cannot buy a recommendation for a product category that does not belong here, which is why there are no gold IRA links anywhere on this site regardless of what that market pays.
Corrections
If a link here is mislabeled, or a recommendation does not match what you found, please say so through the contact page. Disclosure is only worth anything if the thing being disclosed stays accurate. A report that a recommended buyer behaved badly is acted on faster than anything else that arrives, because a stale recommendation on this page does more damage than a missing one.
Which links here earn anything, and which do not
Most links on this site earn nothing at all. Links between guides, links to the valuation arithmetic, links to public sources, and links to buyers that run no affiliate program are all ordinary links and always have been. Where a link does earn a commission, it is labeled at the point of use rather than only in a paragraph at the bottom of the page.
That distinction matters because the site deliberately recommends options that pay nothing. Local coin dealers pay no commission and are the right answer for anyone holding coins that might be collectible. Private sale pays nothing. Waiting for a calmer market pays nothing, and costs this site the transaction entirely. All three appear on this site because they are sometimes the correct advice, and a disclosure page is worth reading precisely to see whether that is true.
How to audit this yourself in twenty minutes
Do not take any of the above on trust. Pick a page on this site that recommends a buyer. Work out the melt value of what you actually hold, using the arithmetic. Get a real quote from that buyer, and a second from a local dealer who pays this site nothing.
If the commission-paying recommendation comes in materially worse than the one that earns nothing, this page is wrong and the site should hear about it. That is a concrete test with a concrete outcome, which is more useful than any promise about editorial independence.
Advertising, sponsorship and things that will not appear
There is no sponsored content on this site and there are no paid reviews. No buyer has been given advance sight of a page about them, and none has been offered the chance to respond before publication in exchange for anything. If that ever changes, it will be stated on the page in question and not only here.
Some categories are excluded permanently rather than case by case. Gold IRA and precious-metals retirement products pay the highest commissions in this sector and carry its worst regulatory record, and they have no business being shown to someone selling inherited cutlery. Buyers who charge sellers to return declined goods are excluded regardless of what they pay. So are firms whose marketing depends on currency-collapse fear, because a business willing to frighten people into selling is not one to hand your property to.
Regulatory basis
This disclosure exists to satisfy the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and testimonials, which requires that a material connection between a publisher and a merchant be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation rather than buried. That is the minimum. The rest of this page goes past the minimum because a site that asks you to trust its rankings owes you the means to check them.
If you would rather avoid the links entirely
That is a completely reasonable position and the site is built to survive it. Every buyer named here can be found directly with a search, and nothing on this site requires you to click a tracked link to get the information. The guides, the arithmetic, the ranking method and the warnings are all readable and usable without any of it, and no page withholds a detail until you follow a link.
If you would prefer to support the site without buying anything, sending a correction is genuinely more valuable than a commission. A report that a recommended buyer has changed its behavior improves the site for everyone who arrives afterward, which is more than a click does.
Why this page is longer than it legally needs to be
The legal minimum is a sentence saying that some links pay a commission. Almost every site meets that minimum and almost nobody reads it, because a single line at the bottom of a page tells a reader nothing they can act on.
What a reader actually wants to know is narrower and harder: does the money change the advice, and how would I tell? This page tries to answer that with things that can be checked rather than promised. Which links pay and which do not. What is excluded regardless of payment. A test you can run in an afternoon with your own metal and two quotes.
If any of it turns out to be untrue, the contact page exists and a report of that kind is acted on faster than anything else that arrives.