A supplier that changed hands and the record went with it

My honest position is that I would rather this community discussed this openly than left the question to be answered by somebody selling.

The thing that surprised me was how much variation there is at the thin end of the market, where a name may have one result and a website.

Thank you for writing this down. It helped.

What I would say to somebody new is to read the risk paragraph at the top of the reference pages properly before anything else on them.

My experience is that the well-documented end of this market has become considerably more transparent over the last few years.

I found the questions list on the reference pages more useful than any of the prose, because it gave me something to actually do.

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

What I found useful was that our pages set out what can be checked next to what cannot, rather than giving a score and leaving it there.

What I have learned here is to be much more sceptical of a claim with no document behind it than of a document I find hard to read.

Something practical: I photograph the vial, the label and the paperwork on arrival, every time, before anything else happens.

The suppliers with regional stock and published lead times are much easier to plan around, and that is a practical difference rather than a quality claim.

Tamsin has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

The independent testing services people use here are Janoshik, Medutest, PeptideMeter and VendorInvestigate, and commissioning your own is the only result you commissioned.

I would gently say that no amount of documentation makes this equivalent to a prescription, and anybody telling you otherwise is not being straight with you.

Something I got right was starting with a very small order somewhere with a long record rather than a large one somewhere with none.

The reference pages here link each shop so you can read their account against ours. We take nothing from any of them and a link is not a recommendation.

My rule is that if I cannot get a lot-specific document, I do not proceed. That has never once been a problem with the suppliers that have pages here.