12 red flags to check before you order
Most bad vendors give themselves away in the first ten minutes of looking. These are the twelve signals we check first when we grade, in the order they usually surface.
None of these flags alone proves a vendor is bad, and a couple of them have innocent explanations. But they stack. Two or three together should slow you down; five or more and you should walk away, whatever the price looks like.
Evidence flags
- 1. No independent COA anywhere. The number one flag. If nobody outside the company has ever verified the product, every quality claim on the site is self-graded homework.
- 2. COAs with no named lab. A purity report that cannot be traced to a real laboratory is a graphic, not evidence.
- 3. The same COA reused everywhere. One report, many products, or numbers that never change between batches. Real results vary.
- 4. No lot numbers. If products carry no batch identity, no test can ever be tied to what lands at your door.
Identity flags
- 5. No company identity. No legal name, no address, no country. You cannot hold an anonymous website accountable for anything.
- 6. A brand-new domain. Look the domain up on any WHOIS tool. A “trusted since 2018” story on a domain registered eight months ago is a story.
- 7. Unreachable support. Send a pre-sales question. No reply within a few business days tells you exactly what post-sales support will look like.
Behavior flags
- 8. Review patterns that look printed. All five stars, all posted the same week, all in the same voice. Real customer feedback is messy and spread over time.
- 9. Prices far below everyone else. Quality synthesis and real testing cost money. A price that ignores those costs is telling you what was skipped.
- 10. No reship or refund policy in writing. Serious vendors state what happens when a parcel is lost or seized. Silence means the risk is entirely yours.
- 11. Medical claims on research products. Research-use-only materials marketed with dosing advice or health promises signal a vendor that ignores compliance wherever convenient.
- 12. Only one way to pay, and it is the wrong one. Crypto-only with no alternative, or card processing through an obviously mismatched merchant name, are both signals worth taking seriously.
Shortcut: our scorecards run all twelve of these checks and more, with dated evidence, for every vendor we grade. Start from the rankings instead of from a search engine.