How We Pick

Last updated September 29, 2026

What we do

1. Start from the problem, not the product. Every page begins with a symptom or a fit failure - pain that runs down one leg, a seat that cuts into the backs of your thighs - and works forward to the specification that addresses it. Products appear last.
2. Pull the published specifications for every candidate. Minimum and maximum seat height, seat depth and whether it adjusts, backrest height, lumbar adjustment type and range, weight capacity, seat width, and the warranty terms including any duty conditions.
3. Map those specifications against body measurements. Using the published anthropometric tables, not our impressions. The arithmetic is shown on the seat height page and the seat depth page so you can check it.
4. Check the product is currently sold before it is featured. A review of a discontinued model is a dead page and a waste of your time.
5. Record the date the specifications were verified and show it on the page. The current date across the site is 2026-09-29.
6. Say who each pick is wrong for. Every product on this site carries both a "who it fits" and a "who it does not fit" line. That second one is mandatory and it is where most of the value is.

What we do NOT do

We do not run a testing lab. We have not sat in every chair on this site, and we will never pretend otherwise. We are not doctors, physical therapists or certified ergonomists - if you are in real pain, see someone who is. Where we quote a specification, it comes from the manufacturer's published figures, and we say so and link to it.

More specifically, the things we will not do:

• Invent a number. If a manufacturer does not publish a seat height, the page says "not published" rather than estimating one from the overall chair height. Several budget brands publish only overall height, and we flag that every time rather than papering over it.
• Claim first-hand use. No "I sat in this for six weeks", no "in our testing", no measured figures presented as ours.
• Claim a credential. No clinical qualifications, no association memberships, no expert panel. The competition leads with those and we cannot honestly match them.
• Publish a statistic we have not read the source of. This one costs us content. There are several claims that appear on every page in this category - kneeling chairs strengthen your core, sitting is the new smoking, a specific number of minutes before you must stand - that we do not repeat because we have not found a source we would cite.
• Display reviews or testimonials. This site is new and has none. An empty space is better than an invented one.
• Mark up an editorial opinion as a product rating. Where we rank picks, that is our editorial ordering. It never appears in the page's structured data as a review rating, because we have not tested the products and it would be false to say we had.

How we make money

Spine & Seat is reader-funded through affiliate links. We participate in the Amazon Associates program and earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through our links, at no extra cost to you.

Commission does not determine ranking or placement. That is easy to write and hard to prove, so here is the evidence rather than the assurance: several pages on this site recommend a twenty-dollar cushion ahead of a chair, the coccyx pain page tells you to buy the cheapest item on it first, and multiple pages tell readers that the honest answer is to buy nothing and adjust what they own. All of those cost us money and all of them are the correct advice.

Why there are no prices on this site

We do not yet run a live price feed. Rather than print a figure that might be a month out of date - which is worse than no figure, because you would plan around it - every product button opens the current price on the retailer's own page.

This is a constraint rather than a principle, and if it changes we will say so here. What will not change is that a price will only ever appear on this site if it came from a live feed with a timestamp attached.

When we remove a pick

• The product is discontinued or no longer reliably available. We check monthly.
• A specification we published turns out to be wrong. We correct it, date the correction, and re-evaluate whether the pick still stands.
• A better option appears in the same band. Rankings are re-reviewed every six months on the Tier 1 pages.
• The manufacturer changes the product without changing the name. Common in this category, and the reason we date the verification.

We never update the year in a page title without actually re-reviewing the page. Shipping a 2026 title on 2024 content is the single most common dishonesty in this category and it is one of the reasons several of the sites ranking above us are beatable.

Where the imagery comes from

The photographs on this site are licensed stock, not photographs of the specific products. We say so under every product image rather than letting a generic chair photo imply it is the model under discussion. When live product imagery becomes available through the retailer's own API, it will replace the stock, and the labeling will change with it.

How to tell us we are wrong

Email contact@spineandseat.com. If a specification is wrong we will check it against the manufacturer's published figures, correct it, and date the correction on the page. If a product we feature has been discontinued, tell us and we will pull it.

The corrections process is written out in the editorial policy.