How we audit a supplement storefront

We are not a lab. We do not assay capsules or run clinical trials, and any review that claims to do both on a shoestring is telling you a story. What we do is narrower and, we think, more useful to somebody about to spend money: we audit how a product is sold.

What we actually check

• Label consistency across storefronts. We compare the ingredient panel shown on official landing pages against third-party listings for the same brand name. A brand that shows two different formulas is telling you something important about itself.
• Checkout behaviour. We follow purchase links and note where they actually land, what product name appears at checkout, and which company processes the payment. Redirects to unrelated brands are a finding, not a footnote.
• Domain permanence. A brand hosted on a disposable developer subdomain is harder to chase for a refund than one with a registered corporate site. We note which it is.
• Dosage against reference intakes. Where a supplement facts panel is available, we check declared amounts against published reference figures — the NIH's RDA tables, for example — and report gaps in either direction.
• Claim-to-evidence distance. Research on an ingredient is not research on a finished product. We say which one a marketing claim is actually leaning on.
• Seal literacy. Facility registration, GMP compliance and product approval are three different things. We spell out which a badge represents.

How the score is built

Our score out of 5 is a weighted composite of six axes: format convenience, label consistency, checkout reliability, dosing against references, brand permanence and marketing honesty. Each is scored independently, and we publish the individual bars so you can disagree with our weighting rather than just our conclusion.

A product can score well on ingredients and badly overall. That is not a contradiction — it means the formula may be fine but you cannot reliably get it, verify it, or get your money back.

What we will not do

• Call something a scam without a documented basis. We report findings and let the word stay yours.
• Present marketing testimonials as if they were independent evidence.
• Quote a price we cannot confirm you will actually be shown.
• Recommend a supplement as a substitute for medical advice, in any category, ever.

Corrections

If we have got something wrong — a figure, a date, an attribution — write to desk@sodapeakreview.com. We correct on the page, with a note, rather than quietly.