How Salaaz Works

What is Salaaz, really?

Salaaz is an ethical commerce platform built for the shopper who does her own research.

That sentence does a lot of work. Three pieces matter:

“Ethical commerce” means we verify, document, and publish what our vendors disclose about how their products are made. Materials. Workers. Environment. Transparency. Each is a pillar of how we score products and rank vendors. Disclosure is the difference between a marketing claim and a verifiable fact, and Salaaz exists to make that difference visible.

“Platform” means we’re the home for vendors and shoppers to find each other. We don’t own most of the products on Salaaz. We vet the vendors, publish editorial work about their craft, and provide the surfaces shoppers use to consider what they’re buying. The commerce happens between vendor and shopper; we hold the space.

“The shopper who does her own research” means we’re built for a specific kind of buying behavior. Not the impulse buyer. Not the lowest-price hunter. Not the trend-follower.

The person who opens 14 browser tabs to compare four products on materials, sourcing, durability, and workshop conditions before making a $60 decision. Who keeps a Notes.app entry titled “linen options 2025” with bullet points of what she’s narrowed down to. Who reads the About page on every vendor’s website.

If that’s how you buy, Salaaz was built for you.

What Salaaz is not

Worth being explicit about what we’re not, because Salaaz has been deliberately built to not be several things you might assume:

How does it work? The five pieces

Five components that fit together. Understanding all five is the difference between using the platform and understanding it.

1. Products

Every product comes from a vetted vendor and carries documented information about how it was made. We assign an ethics score from 0-100, broken into four pillars:

• Materials: what it’s made of, where the materials come from
• Workers: who made it, under what conditions
• Environment: what production does to the natural world
• Transparency: how openly the vendor discloses the above

2. Vendors

Every vendor goes through a three-stage vetting process before they can list:

1. Verification of business identity
2. Documentation of production methods
3. Review of specific claims about materials or labor

Vetting takes weeks. Some vendors don’t pass. We don’t list vendors who refuse to disclose the basics of how they operate, exaggerate their practices, or fail verification of specific claims.

Once vetted, each vendor has a profile showing what they make, where they make it, who they are, and which Salaaz editorial articles have covered their work. Vendor profiles include a supply chain map showing the geographic origin of their materials and workshops. This is one of the most distinctive pieces of Salaaz. Most commerce platforms show you a product photo and a price; we show you where it came from.

3. Editorial

Salaaz publishes long-form editorial articles about commerce, materials, workshops, supply chains, and the people doing this work well. 82 articles since 2024, roughly two or three per month.

Editorial is what gives the platform its reasoning, and the reasoning is what distinguishes Salaaz from competitor platforms that move products faster but explain them less.

Editorial is not promotional. We don’t write articles to push specific products. Articles about specific vendors are clearly disclosed when commissioned (vendor pays Salaaz for the editorial work; Salaaz controls the editorial; the piece is honest about both). Most articles are not vendor-specific: they’re about a category, a question, a debate within ethical commerce.

4. Lists

Lists are how shoppers organize their research. A list is a personal collection of products you’re considering, have bought, or have deliberately decided against. Three privacy states:

• Private: just you
• Shared link: sent to someone specific
• Public: anyone can find it

The brand-defining feature is the passed state. When you add a product to a list and later decide not to buy it, you can mark it passed with reason, keeping the item in the list but noting why.

Lists have a curator (the person who made it) and can be forked by other shoppers who want to build on them. Fork attribution is permanent. The original curator is always credited. Lists can be co-curated by up to two additional contributors (three total) for households shopping together or small teams.

Public lists let other shoppers find your curation, follow you as a curator, and (if you’re a public curator yourself) suggest products to add. You’re never required to make a list public; the social layer is opt-in.

5. Curators

Make at least one of your lists public, and you become a curator. Your curator profile shows:

• Your public lists
• The vendors you follow
• An aggregate ethics signal across your lists
• Your reading history (if you choose to make it visible)

A small number of curators (1-2% per year) eventually get commissioned by Salaaz to write editorial pieces. It’s the only money that flows from Salaaz to a curator. It’s not a path you can apply for; it happens because the curator’s work made the editorial team want to commission them.

Who is Salaaz for?

Salaaz is for you if:

• You read vendor About pages before buying
• You keep research notes about purchases you’re considering
• You’ve been disappointed by greenwashing and want to verify claims
• You value knowing where your things come from
• You find standard e-commerce overwhelming, performative, or exhausting
• You want to be treated as capable of making your own decisions with good information

Salaaz is probably not for you if:

• You shop primarily on price
• You want fast checkout with minimal product information
• You enjoy the entertainment of social-commerce (TikTok Shop, Instagram Shop)
• You’re looking for a feed of new things to discover passively
• You expect every purchase to be a quick decision

These are descriptions, not judgments. Different platforms exist for different needs. We’re being honest about which one we are.

How does Salaaz make money?

We’re transparent about our economics because the brand depends on it.

The core: Salaaz takes 10% commission on each sale. No listing fee. No monthly fee for vendors during their first year. No premium tier that buys visibility. Vendors keep 90% of every sale.

Beyond the commission, our brand-aligned revenue paths:

What we explicitly don’t do for money:

• Sell ranking, search placement, or “featured” positions
• Run advertising inside or alongside the platform
• Sell user data, in any form
• Run affiliate commissions on outbound links
• Operate a premium curator tier with paid-for visibility
• Pad the platform with sponsored content disguised as editorial

These commitments mean Salaaz grows more slowly than competitor platforms. We think this trade is correct for what we’re building.

How should I use Salaaz?

There’s no single right way, but here’s how the platform tends to work for people who get the most out of it:

Start by reading. The editorial section is the entry point. Pick an article on a topic you care about and read it through. The articles are not optimized for skimming; they’re written to be read in 8-15 minutes. Once you’ve read three or four, you’ll understand what Salaaz is about.

Then start a list. Pick something you’re actually considering buying: a specific item, category, or decision. Make a list for it. Add items you’re researching. Add notes about what you’re learning. Mark items passed with reason when you decide against them.

The list can stay private. Most users keep most lists private. This is the right default. The personal-utility value of a list (a place to hold your research) is independent of whether anyone else sees it.

If you go public, do it because you want to. Public lists are useful for shoppers facing the same decision you’ve worked through. Spent three months researching the right cast-iron skillet? Your list of what you considered and what you decided is genuinely valuable. But public isn’t a feature you need to use to get value from Salaaz.

Follow vendors and curators whose taste you trust. When a vendor you follow has new work, you’ll see it in your feed. When a curator you follow publishes a new list, same. The feed is quiet by design (no notification spam, no badges or red dots), but it’s the most useful surface once you’ve built up signals about whose taste you trust.

Treat Salaaz as a place to think, not a place to buy quickly. This is the core posture. Other commerce platforms optimize for fast decisions; Salaaz is for slow ones.

What’s coming next?

Features in active development or near-term planning. We mention them because users sometimes ask:

What won’t we do?

Things we get asked about and have decided not to do, for the same reason: they would compromise what Salaaz is for.

No AI-generated content in editorial. Every editorial article on Salaaz is written by a human writer. We use AI tooling to help with research and drafting; the editorial voice and judgment are human. Articles labeled Salaaz editorial are not AI-generated.

No AI-generated product recommendations. Discovery uses honest mechanisms: taste-overlap with people whose work you’ve engaged with, editorial-curated selections, recency-based browsing. There’s no recommendation engine in the algorithmic-feed sense.

No subscription required to browse. Editorial is free. The platform is free. The newsletter is free. We may add a paid editorial tier in the future for additional in-depth work, but the core platform stays free to browse.

No mandatory account creation to read. You can read editorial, browse vendors, and view public lists without an account. Account creation is required only when you want to do things that need to persist (your own lists, your follow relationships, your reading history).

No data tracking beyond what’s needed. We use standard analytics to understand how the platform is being used. We don’t track individuals across the web, sell tracking pixels to third parties, or build profiles to sell to anyone.

A closing note

Salaaz is a small platform. We’ve been at this since 2023. We’re not as big as the platforms we compete against. We may never be. The brand commitments we’ve made rule out the tactics those platforms use to grow fast.

The trade we’re making is that the audience that comes through brand-aligned slow growth tends to stay, and the vendors who join because of editorial credibility tend to commit.

Over years, this compounds into a platform that does specific things well rather than many things passably.

If that’s the kind of platform you want to be part of, as a shopper, a curator, a vendor, or just a reader, we’re glad you found us. If it isn’t, that’s fine too. There are other platforms for other needs.

Either way, thanks for reading this far. Most platforms don’t have a page like this and don’t think they need one. We think this is exactly the kind of thing Salaaz’s audience needs to find when they’re trying to understand what they’ve stumbled into.

So: this is what we are. Welcome, or welcome-back, or no-thanks-but-now-you-know.