This site publishes a statement only when a public source can be shown for it, marks everything else as unverified, and runs no scores or rankings of its own. Five rules govern every entry here, and each page shows the date it was last reviewed.
1. When is a statement published?
Every factual claim carries a source and a date on the page where it appears, and a link to the original where one exists. If the only place a claim exists is a seller's own description, it does not get published as a fact.
2. What happens when something is unknown?
Where something is not publicly documented (a factory's ownership, its output, the steel grade used in a specific batch), the page says so. "Not verified" is a published result on this site, not a gap to be covered with a plausible sentence.
3. Are factories or sellers scored?
We publish no rating of our own and no ranking of sellers. Where a third-party test exists, we reproduce its numbers with a link to the original and the caveats its authors attached. Words like "best", "trusted" or "recommended" do not appear as our judgement, because a site that sells nothing has no business ranking anyone.
What a seller profile does carry is a state per dimension with its evidence: clear, mixed, adverse or unverified, each traced to something a stranger can re-check, and never an aggregate, a star rating or a position in a list. The seven dimensions, the four states and the two rules that keep the states from becoming a ranking are published in full on the scoring rules page, and none of it can be bought.
4. Can a listing's status be bought?
A listing's status on this site cannot be purchased, and the process for a business to manage its own listing is the same for every business, including any connected to the operator of this site. If commercial placement is ever introduced, it will be labelled as such, in the same font, on the same page, and never as a status.
5. What happens when a correction is needed?
Every page shows the date it was last reviewed. When a source turns out to be wrong, or a claim is superseded, the page is corrected and the correction is noted rather than swapped without comment. Rights-holder requests are handled through the channel described on the About page.
What does this site not cover?
- Prices attached to a listing. A price next to a listing is a promise we cannot keep and it goes stale without anyone noticing. What we do publish is a dated observation of asking prices across catalogues, with the sample size and the snapshot date on it — see Market. This is a change of rule made on 2026-10-01: before that date this site published no price data at all.
- Seller rankings or shortlists. See rule 3.
- Instructions for passing goods through customs or for avoiding duties.
- Anything about an individual buyer or seller that is not already public.
Why does one page name a domain and another does not?
Two pages on this site handle sellers in opposite ways, and the difference is deliberate rather than an inconsistency. The market page publishes ranges of asking prices and names no shop at all: a range with a sample size and a date is a statement about a market, and it stays true whether or not anyone is named beside it. The seller records name the domain, because a record is a statement about one specific subject - its registry entry, its catalogue - and a record that hides its subject cannot be re-checked by the person reading it. So the rule is not "never name anyone". It is that a name appears only where the claim is about that named subject and the evidence for it sits on the same page: prices belong to markets, registry and catalogue facts belong to domains.
What gets read is equally narrow. Collection is limited to the public pages of a domain - its listings, catalogue data including any public JSON it serves, asking prices, and the shipping, returns and warranty wording it publishes - read with automated tools that may include AI-assisted extraction, and kept as dated snapshots. We never collect customer or order data and never touch login-protected or private areas. Where a domain has a verified claim, re-checking follows our refresh cycle and removing its DNS record stops collection for it; the terms a seller accepts, and their version, are set out on the badge page.
What does the evidence grade A, B or C mean?
A seller record carries a grade, and it is the one number on those pages that is easy to misread, so it is defined here. The grade counts how many of the seven checkable dimensions carried evidence at the last review: A for five or more, B for two to four, C for zero or one. It measures how complete our record is and nothing else. It is not a rating of a shop, not a judgement of quality, and not a comparison between two domains: a low grade means the material behind the record was thin, not that anything was found. A domain can hold a high grade and a bad record, and it can hold a low grade with nothing wrong in it, because a dimension that could not be run is published as unverified instead of being counted against anyone. The seven dimensions themselves, and the four states, are on the scoring rules page.
Does this site send traffic anywhere?
No. There are no outbound links to any shop on this site: not to a dealer, not to a factory's storefront, and not to any business connected to the operator, including any site in the same ownership group. The only external links on this site point to the third-party sources cited on the page they appear on, such as the forum thread a score table comes from. That is a rule we can be held to rather than a promise: it is checked automatically on every page before publication, and a link outside that set fails the build.
Why this matters: the sites this reference work competes with are funded by such links: a listing that routes a reader to a shop's checkout turns a reference page into an advertisement. A site that takes no money for listings and sends no traffic has no reason to bend what it says.
Last reviewed 2026-10-01.