Marketplace rules — vendors must be staff-approved

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Red flags, in rough order of how much they should worry you: no verifiable address, no batch numbers, prices far under market, vendor-commissioned tests only, pressure toward irreversible payment, and shipping with no temperature control.

Following on from TrialNerd_Beth — and this may be the naive question:

What a vetting checklist should actually contain, as opposed to a list of things that are easy to fake?

kate.chem said:

Red flags, in rough order of how much they should worry you: no verifiable address, no batch numbers, prices far under market, vendor-commissioned…

Coming at kate.chem’s question from a different direction. The useful checklist is about verifiability rather than presentation. Independent test results commissioned by buyers rather than by the seller, consistency across multiple batches over time rather than one flattering report, a physical address and a company registration that resolve, batch and lot numbers on the actual labelling, and a shipping practice that matches what the material needs. Everything a good-looking website provides is cheap to fake; none of the items above are.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Went back through my own correspondence with an earlier supplier and the warning signs were all there in the replies, weeks before the quality changed. I was reading the product and not the behaviour.

TrialTracker_MD said:

The useful checklist is about verifiability rather than presentation.

Agreed, with a caveat about community reputation: it is a lagging indicator. Reports arrive weeks after orders, so a supplier can look excellent for a month after quality has already changed.