What a vendor can pay for

What a vendor can pay for

Their own description, on their own profile page

A paragraph the vendor writes about themselves — what they stock, how they test, how they ship. It appears in a bordered block on their profile, labelled as their words, with a line saying we have not checked any of it. It appears nowhere else on the site: not on a card in the directory, not in the price index, not in search results here.

A link to where they publish certificates

One outbound link to their own certificate-of-analysis page. It is nofollow, it passes no ranking signal, and we do not host, mirror, endorse or verify a single document behind it. A vendor publishing certificates is a fact about their process, not evidence about their product.

Being marked as having paid

Which is not really something they buy, it is something we insist on. Where vendor-supplied wording appears, a reader is told it is vendor-supplied and told it is a paid profile, in the same block, without having to look for it.

What no amount of money buys

This half is the reason the other half is worth anything. If the order of a table could be bought, the order would stop meaning what it appears to mean, and the index would have destroyed the only thing about it anyone would pay to be near.

Position in any table

Not the price index, not the directory, not a compound page, not a comparison, not a search result. Every price table on this site sorts on price per milligram and nothing else, and the sort has no idea what tier anyone is on. A paid vendor is marked exactly where they already stood.

Inclusion in the price index

A listing enters the index when a person has confirmed what is actually in the box, and for no other reason. Paying does not add a listing, does not speed up the review queue, and does not get an unreadable catalogue read.

A competitor's removal

We will not delist, downrank, hide or quietly stop crawling a vendor because another vendor asked. A vendor leaves this directory when they stop trading or when we cannot read them, and those are the only two reasons.

Any change to a displayed price

The number is what they listed when we last looked. It is not rounded down, not replaced with a sale price, not held back while a rise settles, and not removed because it is unflattering. A price that can be bought is not a price, it is an advertisement.

Anything said as if it were ours

No paid sentence ever appears in our voice, and nothing on this site is ranked, recommended or described as good because of money. We publish no vendor ratings at all, which forecloses the question.

A link that helps them rank

Every outbound vendor link on this site is nofollow, paid or not. We take no affiliate commission and carry no affiliate parameters, so what a reader does after they leave is worth exactly nothing to us.

How you can check

• Every table states its sort. The price index sorts on price per milligram within a product form, and says so on the page. Sort it yourself and see whether anything moves that should not.
• The directory publishes the proportion. The vendor directory carries a figure for how many of the listed vendors are on a paid profile. It is counted from the same rows the page is built from, not typed in, so it cannot be zero because somebody forgot.
• A paid block says it is one. Vendor-supplied wording is never mixed into ours. If you cannot tell whose sentence you are reading on a vendor profile, that is a bug and we would like to be told.
• A lapsed arrangement lapses. A paid profile is stored with the last day it applies and disappears on its own afterwards, rather than waiting for somebody to remember.

If we ever change this

The list above is a standing commitment, not a current price list. If it ever changes, it changes here first and in public, and the wording on the price index changes with it — those sentences are generated from what is actually being sold rather than typed by hand, precisely so that nobody can leave a promise standing after it has stopped being true.

Questions about a listing, or a correction to one, go to [email protected]. A correction to a price is free and always will be; you do not need a paid profile to tell us a number is wrong, and asking us to remove a correct one is the one request we will not act on.