How we audit, step by step.

The numbers above frame the audit problem: roughly half of all peptides on the grey market do not match their label, identity fraud is real and prevalent, and even high-traffic vendors close with little warning. Methodology is the response.

Every audit cycle, we place at least three orders per vendor under aliases. Orders ship to a private mailbox unconnected to the publication. We pay retail and we pay in the same payment methods our readers would use — typically crypto for grey-market vendors, cards where they're available.

Vendors who recognize us and offer comped product or expedited treatment have their order flagged and re-placed under a different alias from a different address. The score for that cycle uses the second order, not the first.

Vials are unboxed on camera and sent to one of two third-party labs we rotate between. The labs do not know which vendor sent which sample until after the report is filed. Tests include reverse-phase HPLC for purity quantification and mass spectrometry for identity confirmation.

Where vendor-supplied COAs differ from our independent lab results by more than 5 percentage points on purity, the discrepancy is published in the vendor's audit notes and weighted into the COA-quality subscore.

Every order's timeline is logged: order placed, label created, in-transit first scan, delivered, opened. Median across at least three orders becomes the shipping subscore.

Customer service is tested by submitting one realistic question and one deliberately confusing question per cycle. Response time, tone, and accuracy all factor into the support subscore.

We don't average the four subscores — we weight them. Weighting reflects what actually matters for a research buyer:

• · purity / coa quality — 40%
• · label accuracy — 25%
• · shipping — 20%
• · customer service / support — 15%

A score of 90 or above means “buy with confidence.” 70–89 is “works, with caveats.” Below 70 means we've found enough red flags that the audit notes deserve a careful read before ordering.

Audits are republished on a quarterly cycle. Within a cycle, scores can move if a vendor changes lab partners, payment processors, or shipping carriers, or if a reader-submitted COA contradicts our most recent finding. Material changes are noted in the corrections log.

We don't evaluate clinical safety, dose efficacy, or human-use outcomes. Compounds discussed on this site are referenced from peer-reviewed literature and sold by vendors as research-grade material.