The Vendor Transparency Standard

The usual advice for buying research peptides is to find a seller other people trust. That advice fails for a simple reason: the people recommending are rarely the people testing, and a reputation built in a comment section carries no documentation behind it. Ask which batch was tested, by whom, and against what method, and most recommendations have no answer.

This standard scores what a seller discloses. It does not score product quality, and it cannot. Nobody can assess a vial from a website. A seller who publishes batch-matched independent testing might still ship poor material; a seller who publishes nothing might ship excellent material. What disclosure tells you is whether you are in a position to find out, and whether the seller has arranged things so you can check their claims or so you cannot.

Most criteria can be answered from public information, a product page or a single email, before you pay. That is deliberate. A standard you can only apply after purchase comes too late. Two criteria need the vial in hand: the lot number on the certificate, and the lot number printed on the vial.

So the ranking will use these criteria and nothing else. A seller earns a place by publishing what the criteria ask for, and loses it by stopping. Every score will carry the date we checked it, because a supplier that documented well last quarter can change laboratories, change contract manufacturers, or quietly stop publishing. No seller can pay for a score or a place on the list. Criteria cannot be bought.

We score each seller on the same 20 criteria, using its public pages and one written request for documents. A criterion counts only when we have seen the document, because a promise to send one is not the document. Sellers will be ranked by score, and every score will show the date it was checked and the criteria it missed.

Scores are checked again on a schedule and whenever a seller changes its documents. A seller can ask for a new score at any time by sending the missing documents. A seller that disagrees with a score can tell us why, and a correction, when one is due, is logged on the Corrections page.

The first scores are being checked now and will appear on this page when they are done. Until then, no seller is named on this site.

A high rank is not a guarantee and a low rank is not an accusation. Small operations serving genuine laboratories often score poorly on operational transparency while running careful chemistry, because their customers are institutions who ask for documents directly rather than expecting to read them on a website.

Read which criteria failed rather than how many. Four gaps in operational transparency describe a seller who is hard to identify. Four gaps in testing rigor describe a seller whose product is unverified. Those are different problems and only one of them is about chemistry.

And a seller who passes every criterion has proven only that they document their work. They have not proven the compound does anything. That question is answered by trial data, not by paperwork, and it is what the compound table tracks: how many completed randomized human trials exist for each compound, and where each sits with regulators.