When you begin your shopping experience from one of our links you will pay exactly the same price as if you went directly to the retailer's website.  Affiliate links are a win-win-win solution!  The retailer wins, GuitarNuts wins, and ultimately you win because we are able to improve GuitarNuts without resorting to subscriptions.

Remember that we only get credit for sales made when you started from one of our links, so each time you go e-shopping please remember to start here!  (Even if your first purchase at a particular retailer is made from one of our links, purchases on subsequent visits to their site are not credited to GuitarNuts unless you use our special links again.)  If you are purchasing several items from a retailer during a single session, you can shop normally once you enter their site and we will get credited properly.  I.e. just fill your shopping cart and check out as usual, you needn't return here for each little item you add to the cart.

Finally, if you do not believe that GuitarNuts is worth supporting in this fashion then, please, find a website you do believe is worth supporting and use their affiliate links to these retailers!

Above all, please don't spend hours in a local shop test-driving everything in the store when you know darn well you're going to order it through the mail to save ten bucks.

Of course, some of you don't have access to a good local shop and others sometimes need something in a hurry that the local shop can't or won't get as quickly as an overnight online order.  When you run into those sitatuions, that's what our shopping links are for!

January, 2004  For almost eight years (five since purchasing the domain name and signing up for commercial hosting) I've paid the cost of supporting GuitarNuts out of my pocket.  This is not a huge expense, but I could own another nice guitar and tube amp for what it has cost me (yeah, like I really need more stuff...).  I've never really minded this expense because GuitarNuts has always been a "labor of love" and somewhat of a crusade.

However, I feel that lack of funds is holding GuitarNuts back from becoming even greater than it is, and I simply can't afford to spend more on it.  When I started the forums last year I had to have rather vicious auto-pruning on (killing threads that were inactive for two weeks) to keep the database size and the "query cost" of searches and such reasonable.  Now I've restarted the forums without autopruning and I'm estimating that, if they grow at the rate they were growing before, I will have to upgrade my commercial hosting account again within six months.

I've been approached by banner advertisers many times but I would pull the plug on GuitarNuts before I would subject you to a bunch of annoying and often inappropriate banners.  I've also been approached by a few equipment manufacturers offering to sponsor GuitarNuts and I've rejected such advances because I refuse to place myself in a position of having to "pull punches" to avoid offending a sponsor.

Old timers around here may remember that I tried an affiliate link (to one of these retailers, in fact) several years ago and cancelled my agreement with them, forfeiting money that was "in the pipeline," because I felt that their customer service was not responsive.  A few months ago I had occasion to return a purchase from that retailer and I have to say that I was blown away by the professionalism and responsiveness of their customer service department.  I guess they've learned a few things over the last five years about running an online business (hmm, seeing as how they're still in business when dot coms are dropping like flies, I guess that goes without saying).