Price went up $50 this month with no warning - switching vendors — 6 month update

DanielChem_CHI said:

Prices dramatically below market are the strongest single signal, and the reason is arithmetic rather than suspicion.

I read this differently from DanielChem_CHI, on substance rather than tone. The affordability discussion here usually stops at individual tactics. At list price this class is out of reach for most of the people who would benefit, and no amount of appeal strategy changes that — it is a pricing problem wearing a paperwork costume.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. 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.

Worth separating that from vendor vetting, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

LipidDoc_ATL said:

The affordability discussion here usually stops at individual tactics.

Coming at LipidDoc_ATL’s question from a different direction. 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.

Following on from julia.endo — and this may be the naive question:

What a vetting checklist should actually contain, as opposed to a list of things that are easy to fake?

Closing the loop on my own question.

Follow-up — getting the denial reason in writing was the step that mattered. It named the criterion, and the criterion was a document I already had.