Advertising & affiliate disclosure
Checkthevendor.com is free to read. We make money in two clearly‑marked ways, affiliate links and labelled sponsored placements, and we keep a hard firewall between that money and our grades.
The same rubric applies to every vendor, paying or not. Sponsored content is always labelled and never enters our merit ranking. Affiliate links are always marked. If you read one line on this page, read that one.
How we make money
We are an independent grading and comparison site. We do not sell peptides, we rate the vendors who do. Our revenue comes from two sources, and only these two.
Affiliate links
When we link to a vendor, that link may be an affiliate link. If you click it and go on to buy, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The price you pay is the same whether you use our link or type the vendor’s address directly.
Sponsored placements
A vendor can pay for a clearly‑labelled placement, such as a promoted slot or a sponsored notice. This is advertising. It buys visibility in a labelled ad space. It does not buy anything else.
The firewall: money never touches a grade
This is the rule everything else depends on, so we state it plainly.
- Payment never buys a grade, and it never improves one. A vendor cannot pay to raise its score, change its letter, or move up the ranking.
- The same published rubric applies to everyone. Paying and non‑paying vendors are scored against identical criteria and weights, with the same integrity gate and the same evidence standards.
- Sponsored content is always labelled, and kept out of the merit ranking. A sponsored slot is an ad in a visibly marked space, it does not appear as, or mix into, our ranked grades.
- We grade vendors who have never paid us, and vendors who have. Their grades read the same way and are built the same way.
If a vendor offers us money in exchange for a better grade, a higher ranking, or the removal of a finding, we decline, and the offer has no effect on what we publish.
What actually decides a grade
So you can see there is no room for money in the process, here is what does decide a grade. Every vendor is scored 0–100 against a published rubric across eight weighted criteria.
- Lab Testing & COA Verification25%
- Measured Purity & Contaminants18%
- Transparency & Disclosure12%
- Reputation & Customer Service12%
- Pricing & Value10%
- Shipping & Fulfilment8%
- Payment & Checkout Trust8%
- Website & Operational Trust7%
Every score is tagged measured (a verifiable fact, such as a lab result) or editorial (a labelled opinion), with the evidence linked, plus a confidence label of High, Medium, or Limited. None of those evidence sources is “the vendor paid us”. See the full methodology →
How to tell what you are looking at
You should be able to identify our commercial relationships at a glance.
Where we earn a commission on a link, we mark it so you know before you click. The price you pay does not change.
Paid placements carry a clear Sponsored or Ad label and are visually separated from editorial content and from the merit ranking.
Grades and rankings are our opinion, grounded in disclosed, dated facts, produced under the firewall above, regardless of any commercial relationship.
If you ever cannot tell whether something is a paid placement or independent editorial, that is a problem we want to fix. Tell us and we will correct the labelling.
Why this disclosure exists
We publish this so you can trust what you read here, and to meet the disclosure expectations that apply to sites like ours.
In line with US FTC guidance on endorsements and affiliate relationships, and with EU and UK rules on identifying advertising and commercial communications, we disclose our affiliate links and we label our sponsored content clearly and up front. Our aim is that no reasonable reader is misled about whether we have a financial interest in a link or placement.
These disclosure practices are part of our methodology, not a layer on top of it. They are reviewed whenever we update our methodology.
Questions, or think we got it wrong?
If a disclosure looks unclear, or you believe a commercial relationship has influenced something we published, we want to hear about it. Vendors have a free right of reply and access to our corrections process, whether or not they pay us.