A publication that ranks shops owes its readers a clear account of how the ranking is made and who benefits from it. This is ours. It is short on purpose: if a principle cannot be stated in a paragraph, it is probably not a principle.
1. Some shops are affiliate partners
Three shops are partners of The Peptide Ledger: Nexo Research, Europa-Peptide and Peptid24. When you buy from them through our links, we earn a commission. They hold places 1, 2 and 3 in our ranking, in that order, and supply the reader codes we print.
We are not going to pretend that arrangement does not exist, or that it does not shape the page. It does: an affiliate relationship can influence where a shop is placed. What we promise is that it never changes a criterion score, and that the affiliate note sits beside the ranking, on this site’s method page and in the footer of every page.
2. Other shops are ranked by score
Below the partners, every other shop is ordered by its overall score, and nothing else. Those shops pay us nothing and have no codes from us; their scores come from public information — their own websites where they have one, and public listings and buyer ratings. If a non-partner scores higher than a partner on a criterion, our criterion rankings show it, and the comparison tables mark the leader row by row.
3. Scores are editorial estimates
Each shop is scored from 0 to 10 on five criteria: purity & testing (30%), transparency (20%), price & value (20%), shipping (15%) and support (15%). The overall score is the weighted average.
Those numbers are estimates made by our editors from the shop’s public information — its website, imprint, terms, product pages and any certificates it publishes. They are not laboratory results. We have not run our own tests on any product, and we will not write as if we had. When a shop publishes more, we re-read it and the score can move.
4. “Not published” means not published
You will see the words not published a lot in our facts tables: payment methods, lab partner, refund policy, founding year, headquarters. That is deliberate. When a shop has not published a fact, we do not fill the gap with a guess, an industry average or something we half-remember from a forum.
“Not published” is not the same as “no”. A shop with no public COAs might still send you one if you ask. But a missing fact is a missing fact, and it counts against transparency in our scoring — partners included. Nexo Research, our lead partner, currently shows “not published” for lab reports, and its review says so in the first paragraphs, not the last.
5. Reviews come only from verified readers
Reader letters require a verified email address and pass moderation before they appear. We do not publish invented reviews, borrowed star ratings or made-up counts. Where nobody has written yet, the page says “no letters yet” and invites you to be the first — it does not show a placeholder average.
Reader ratings are shown next to our editorial score, never mixed into it.
6. Codes come from partner shops, with their terms attached
Every coupon we list comes from a partner shop, with its full terms, minimum order and end date beside it. Expired codes leave the site automatically. Shops can change a code at any time; if one fails, tell us and we will take it up with the shop.
Codes are masked until you verify an email address. That is not a trick to collect addresses: shops cap how often a code can be used, and codes posted in the open are scraped and switched off. One verification opens every code on the site for 180 days, and every email we send has a one-click unsubscribe link.
7. Research use only
The shops we cover sell their products for laboratory research use only. We write about shops — their paperwork, transparency, prices and logistics. We do not publish dosing, administration or medical guidance, and we remove reader letters that do.
How to hold us to this
If you think a page breaks one of these principles, write to us in a reader letter on the relevant review page. Corrections are made in the open: we would rather print an erratum than leave a mistake in the ledger.
Products sold by these shops are for laboratory research use only. Nothing in this article is medical advice.