Everything you need to know about Shopping by Shop TODAY

Welcome to Shopping by Shop TODAY. This section is powered by Shop TODAY, a division of TODAY.com focused on delivering shopping recommendations and updates regarding trending products, sales, deals and more.

Shop TODAY works closely with the TODAY and the NBC News editorial teams. You can find shopping recommendations on the NBC News Shopping page, as well as in NBC News sections such as BETTER, OUT, BLK, Asian America and Latino. Like everything else on the site, the NBC News Digital mission guides and directs all coverage.

Our team independently selects each item we feature because we think it’s worth knowing about: Shop TODAY editors, writers and experts recommend items that are newsworthy and potentially valuable to readers. They determine these qualifications based on interviews with specialists, reviews and personal experiences. Every shopping article you read will clearly define how and why its recommendations came to be.

If we have a paid relationship with an advertiser, we will be sure to let you know and the article will clearly have 'Sponsored' or 'Branded' labels. We will always let you know why we are featuring a product — if we haven’t tried it ourselves, we’ll let you know and may still share it because thousands of people have. We choose the items in our articles in a few ways:

NBC News Shopping highlights deals on individual items or sales from retailers that readers will want to know about, using the same selection process we use for any article.

In creating shopping guides to help readers find what they’re looking for, we sometimes feature products recommended by experts in relevant fields — such as doctors or child development specialists. Other timely shopping guides are targeted toward a particular holiday or interest and are made up of a curated list of products the reporters think would make great gifts, taking care to only recommend items they would purchase themselves.

An NBC News Shopping editor or writer might share a product they’ve determined readers should know about. They will aim to walk readers through their experience, sharing everything from the initial need that the product is designed to satisfy to how it then fits into their lives.

Sometimes products gain their own popularity and, to that end, NBC News Shopping informs readers about the trending products. This can be a new product launch, a bestselling item, a highly-rated item, and so on. Editors and reporters scour the news, monitor social media and peruse “bestseller” sections from retailers to stay on top of the latest trends. They also contact retailers directly for information on new product launches and exclusive data on top-selling items.

Our inspiration can come from almost anywhere, so if we’re including interesting data in these pieces we’ll be sure to let you know where that information originated. We may not have had a chance to try all these products ourselves (and if we haven’t, we’ll let you know), but we think you’d like to hear about them while they’re hot.

We have affiliate relationships with retailers. That means when you see a link to a retailer in a Shop TODAY story, we may receive a commission fee if you click on that link and decide to purchase anything from that retailer. If you return the items for any reason, we make nothing. In other words, it’s in our interest that we only recommend what we truly believe you will actually find beneficial and valuable. To ensure we are free to cover as wide a range of products as possible, we work with different affiliate networks (like Amazon) to help track referrals from our site to merchant sites. We occasionally create direct relationships with individual retailers who don’t participate in larger affiliate programs.

The majority of articles written on Shopping by Shop TODAY aren’t advertisements and as an editorial team, we determine coverage based on what we think you’d like to see. The goal of our content is to provide a service to you, the reader.