The score is ours, and it is an average of five
Every supplier gets five sub-scores out of five — Testing and COAs, Shipping, Transparency, Support and Payment options. The badge score is the arithmetic mean of those five, rounded to one decimal place. There is no weighting, no adjustment and no editorial thumb on the scale after the sub-scores are set.
The word next to the score is a band, not a separate judgement: 4.3 and above reads Excellent, 3.7 to 4.2 reads Great, 3.1 to 3.6 reads Average, and anything below 3.1 reads Limited. We use Limited rather than a harsher word deliberately, because a low score on this page nearly always means a company has not published something.
What the sub-scores actually measure
All five measure what a logged-out visitor can find and check on the vendor's own public pages. That is a narrow question and we would rather answer a narrow question honestly than a broad one badly.
A five means the vendor publishes the information in detail and in a form somebody else could verify — a named laboratory, a registered address, a stated cutoff time. A four means it is published clearly. A three means it is partly published or asserted without detail. A two means it is claimed with nothing behind it. A one means it is absent. The scale is applied the same way to every company on the list.
What we do not score, and will not invent
We do not score purity, potency, or whether an order arrives, because none of the three can be established from a website and we are not a laboratory. Any review site that hands you a purity number it did not measure is showing you a guess with a decimal point on it.
We also publish no consumer review counts, no star averages derived from other people's ratings, and no user testimonials. We have not collected any, so there are none to show, and inventing them — or quoting a customer nobody can find — is the most common form of dishonesty in this category. If we ever quote a buyer it will be a real, public, linked source you can open yourself.
Ranking, ties and the one pinned position
The list is ordered by score. Ties are broken in favour of the supplier that serves a US buyer with less friction — domestic shipping over a customs border, an open catalogue over a login wall — and the tiebreak is stated in the profile whenever it decides a position.
One position is pinned rather than scored. Peptide Sciences sits at number one with no score at all, badged closed, because it held that position in this category for a decade and is still what people search for. It carries no link and no score because there is nothing left to link to or to rate.
How often this is re-checked, and how to correct it
Every fact on this site was read off the vendor's own live site, and the date it was read is printed at the foot of each page. Sites change; a threshold moves, a policy page appears, a company goes quiet. Where a claim here no longer matches what a vendor publishes, the vendor's own site is right and we are stale.
If you work for one of the companies listed and something here is wrong, write to us and say what page it is wrong on. Corrections are free and do not require a commercial conversation. Placement is not, and never will be, available for purchase.
The five criteria in full
| Criterion | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Testing & COAs | Does the vendor publish third-party test results, and can a buyer actually reach a certificate of analysis for the batch in front of them? A vendor that names the analyses it runs and posts the certificates scores highest. A vendor that says only "lab tested" with nothing behind it scores in the middle. |
| Shipping | What the published shipping policy actually commits to: carrier and speed, a dispatch cutoff, a free-shipping threshold, and which countries are served. A stated threshold and a stated cutoff beat a vague promise of fast delivery. |
| Transparency | How much the company says about itself in public: a street address, a founding year, a named legal entity, a real returns policy. This is the criterion most vendors in this category score worst on, and it is the one that costs a buyer the most when something goes wrong. |
| Support | How you reach a human, and what the vendor commits to. A published phone number outscores a contact form. A stated response window outscores no statement at all. |
| Payment options | Which payment methods the site lists before you reach checkout. Card processing in this category is unstable, so a vendor that names its accepted methods on a public page is telling you something useful. |