Collecting this in one place because it comes up every few weeks and the answer is always assembled from scratch. It is about vendor vetting, and it is deliberately narrow — everything I am not confident about is marked as such.
What is actually established
Prices dramatically below market are the strongest single signal, and the reason is arithmetic rather than suspicion. Synthesis, testing, and cold-chain shipping have floors. A price well under the floor means something was skipped, and the two things that get skipped are testing and content.
The condition it depends on
One flattering data point from a group buy is not consistency. Consistency means separate batches, separately commissioned, over months.
The practical version
Red flags, in rough order of how much they should worry you: no verifiable address, no batch numbers, prices far under market, vendor-commissioned tests only, pressure toward irreversible payment, and shipping with no temperature control.
What I am not sure about
What I am trying to establish is how people are distinguishing a supplier having a bad batch from a supplier on the way out. I would rather have one careful answer than five confident ones.
amsterdam_pete said:Prices dramatically below market are the strongest single signal, and the reason is arithmetic rather than suspicion.
No disagreement with amsterdam_pete. One condition attached. The pattern that distinguishes a bad batch from an exit is behaviour rather than product. A bad batch comes with communication, a reshipment offer and a batch number. An exit comes with slower replies, pressure toward less reversible payment methods, sudden discounting, and the same reassurance repeated without any new information. The product tells you less than the correspondence does.
amsterdam_pete said:Prices dramatically below market are the strongest single signal, and the reason is arithmetic rather than suspicion.
I disagree that testing history is decisive. It tells you what a supplier did when they were being watched. Continuity of behaviour under stress — a late shipment, a failed test, a complaint — is more predictive than any run of good results.
Happy to go further on any of that.
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View ResultsThis one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. The useful checklist is about verifiability rather than presentation. Independent test results commissioned by buyers rather than by the seller, consistency across multiple batches over time rather than one flattering report, a physical address and a company registration that resolve, batch and lot numbers on the actual labelling, and a shipping practice that matches what the material needs. Everything a good-looking website provides is cheap to fake; none of the items above are.
TrialNerd_Beth said:The pattern that distinguishes a bad batch from an exit is behaviour rather than product.
Same experience, arrived at from the opposite direction.