Sussing out new vendors
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Did you ask AI to write this post for you? Why bother with all these obscure vendors when there's plenty of ALREADY VETTED options here? These posts make me think you either WANT to be scammed, or WANT to waste your own time. Either way, best of luck to you and your BOT.
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So as a fun side i went to chat GPT and asked for some peptide vendors, one of the top ones i saw (and was linked to) was a seemingly new vendor.
So some flags are waved at me and given the nature of E-commerce and the abundance of scammers i want to try and do as much due diligence to protect myself.
So from a business-flow standpoint and the fact that peptides can vary wildly in price it stands to reason that there is high-margin in the white-label operation everyone is engaging in. The moats people build for reputable supply chain tends to be branding...so how would a new vendor enter the market. Well any tom dick or harry can create a website take payment (and given the nature of grey-market) accept crypto/zelle only. This is red flag one for me. Its one thing to ship bad product but to black-hole payment with no recourse to potentially get nothing is truly a scam.
So then i look at, is there a product in existence? Does their COA match the company name from a more neutral third party website? Yes...but...i can't really match the company tested to the company's website, that link is dubious. Lets take my use case. The website is shopapexlabs.net Now, i can go through 99% of the process and see some things. The whois on the website is fairly new and obfuscated, not a bad practice given the nature of grey-market peptides and definitely not a bad idea for anonymity. But if i go to freedom diagnostics to look up the provided assentation number its just going to be APEXxxxxxxx Which would be good if there wasn't 100 different companies named APEX something or other....which leads me to wonder, how do i validate this isn't someone spoofing the APEX name and giving me a link to someone else's COA. not a Fake COA but just lying that that COA is for their company?
So now i'm stuck in a place...do i risk about $50 to shoot for the moon for something just to see if they ship it? From there do i even trust that if they send me a vial of white stuff i can trust the label and they aren't spoofing that as well?
Even if i sent it in for lab testing and shelled out another couple hundred on a whim, there's no real way to prove it was white-label product or proverbial snake oil.
But that brings me back to the real crux of everything. Is the risk that suppliers are taking to bring a product to market and making those Chinese connections really worth the likely 90-95% gross profit margins on products? Are they doing anything other than becoming middlemen? Why, if that's the case, are peptides seemingly still so prohibitively expensive for the layman given its small unit volume cost at scale (this is now a massive market)
And finally, how on earth is anyone supposed to break these barriers to entry to keep pressure on the supply side to allow for true market stabilization. It seems $10-20k PER peptide in just up front costs on the distributor to take a stab at trusting their original supplier. Is it really just marketing on their end to essentially last leg ship?
Right now im back to only allowing a credit card to be used, i will no longer attempt to use crypto/zelle but the utter lack of business transparency is really hurting this from a long time thing, and it feels like easy layup for the FDA to clamp down on grey-market stuff because of the inability to hold liable Chinese manufacturers and it seems like the only domestic players in the space are already a part of the bigger player's pipelines.
Anyway, thank god for this website and its vendor verification program, its not Wal-mart/Walgreeens/CVS Trustworth OTC stuff but its about as good as it can get for now...
Side note....anyone wanna try and crowdfund to setup a vertically integrated peptide synthetizing plant and do end user distribution state-side? Maybe need 2-4 mil startup....
Are you on the other side of the world? This felt like a 3:30AM kind of post. LOL I got this idea for a business bro. It cant fail.
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So as a fun side i went to chat GPT and asked for some peptide vendors, one of the top ones i saw (and was linked to) was a seemingly new vendor.
So some flags are waved at me and given the nature of E-commerce and the abundance of scammers i want to try and do as much due diligence to protect myself.
So from a business-flow standpoint and the fact that peptides can vary wildly in price it stands to reason that there is high-margin in the white-label operation everyone is engaging in. The moats people build for reputable supply chain tends to be branding...so how would a new vendor enter the market. Well any tom dick or harry can create a website take payment (and given the nature of grey-market) accept crypto/zelle only. This is red flag one for me. Its one thing to ship bad product but to black-hole payment with no recourse to potentially get nothing is truly a scam.
So then i look at, is there a product in existence? Does their COA match the company name from a more neutral third party website? Yes...but...i can't really match the company tested to the company's website, that link is dubious. Lets take my use case. The website is shopapexlabs.net Now, i can go through 99% of the process and see some things. The whois on the website is fairly new and obfuscated, not a bad practice given the nature of grey-market peptides and definitely not a bad idea for anonymity. But if i go to freedom diagnostics to look up the provided assentation number its just going to be APEXxxxxxxx Which would be good if there wasn't 100 different companies named APEX something or other....which leads me to wonder, how do i validate this isn't someone spoofing the APEX name and giving me a link to someone else's COA. not a Fake COA but just lying that that COA is for their company?
So now i'm stuck in a place...do i risk about $50 to shoot for the moon for something just to see if they ship it? From there do i even trust that if they send me a vial of white stuff i can trust the label and they aren't spoofing that as well?
Even if i sent it in for lab testing and shelled out another couple hundred on a whim, there's no real way to prove it was white-label product or proverbial snake oil.
But that brings me back to the real crux of everything. Is the risk that suppliers are taking to bring a product to market and making those Chinese connections really worth the likely 90-95% gross profit margins on products? Are they doing anything other than becoming middlemen? Why, if that's the case, are peptides seemingly still so prohibitively expensive for the layman given its small unit volume cost at scale (this is now a massive market)
And finally, how on earth is anyone supposed to break these barriers to entry to keep pressure on the supply side to allow for true market stabilization. It seems $10-20k PER peptide in just up front costs on the distributor to take a stab at trusting their original supplier. Is it really just marketing on their end to essentially last leg ship?
Right now im back to only allowing a credit card to be used, i will no longer attempt to use crypto/zelle but the utter lack of business transparency is really hurting this from a long time thing, and it feels like easy layup for the FDA to clamp down on grey-market stuff because of the inability to hold liable Chinese manufacturers and it seems like the only domestic players in the space are already a part of the bigger player's pipelines.
Anyway, thank god for this website and its vendor verification program, its not Wal-mart/Walgreeens/CVS Trustworth OTC stuff but its about as good as it can get for now...
Side note....anyone wanna try and crowdfund to setup a vertically integrated peptide synthetizing plant and do end user distribution state-side? Maybe need 2-4 mil startup....
@richardharris do you think somebody would set up a company, website, promotion, just to rip you off for $50 and then happily disappear? The vendors are trying to stay afloat at least for some time so they have to deliver something. Sites like this allow the customers to share the bad cases and also educate on the ways to check their validity.
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So as a fun side i went to chat GPT and asked for some peptide vendors, one of the top ones i saw (and was linked to) was a seemingly new vendor.
So some flags are waved at me and given the nature of E-commerce and the abundance of scammers i want to try and do as much due diligence to protect myself.
So from a business-flow standpoint and the fact that peptides can vary wildly in price it stands to reason that there is high-margin in the white-label operation everyone is engaging in. The moats people build for reputable supply chain tends to be branding...so how would a new vendor enter the market. Well any tom dick or harry can create a website take payment (and given the nature of grey-market) accept crypto/zelle only. This is red flag one for me. Its one thing to ship bad product but to black-hole payment with no recourse to potentially get nothing is truly a scam.
So then i look at, is there a product in existence? Does their COA match the company name from a more neutral third party website? Yes...but...i can't really match the company tested to the company's website, that link is dubious. Lets take my use case. The website is shopapexlabs.net Now, i can go through 99% of the process and see some things. The whois on the website is fairly new and obfuscated, not a bad practice given the nature of grey-market peptides and definitely not a bad idea for anonymity. But if i go to freedom diagnostics to look up the provided assentation number its just going to be APEXxxxxxxx Which would be good if there wasn't 100 different companies named APEX something or other....which leads me to wonder, how do i validate this isn't someone spoofing the APEX name and giving me a link to someone else's COA. not a Fake COA but just lying that that COA is for their company?
So now i'm stuck in a place...do i risk about $50 to shoot for the moon for something just to see if they ship it? From there do i even trust that if they send me a vial of white stuff i can trust the label and they aren't spoofing that as well?
Even if i sent it in for lab testing and shelled out another couple hundred on a whim, there's no real way to prove it was white-label product or proverbial snake oil.
But that brings me back to the real crux of everything. Is the risk that suppliers are taking to bring a product to market and making those Chinese connections really worth the likely 90-95% gross profit margins on products? Are they doing anything other than becoming middlemen? Why, if that's the case, are peptides seemingly still so prohibitively expensive for the layman given its small unit volume cost at scale (this is now a massive market)
And finally, how on earth is anyone supposed to break these barriers to entry to keep pressure on the supply side to allow for true market stabilization. It seems $10-20k PER peptide in just up front costs on the distributor to take a stab at trusting their original supplier. Is it really just marketing on their end to essentially last leg ship?
Right now im back to only allowing a credit card to be used, i will no longer attempt to use crypto/zelle but the utter lack of business transparency is really hurting this from a long time thing, and it feels like easy layup for the FDA to clamp down on grey-market stuff because of the inability to hold liable Chinese manufacturers and it seems like the only domestic players in the space are already a part of the bigger player's pipelines.
Anyway, thank god for this website and its vendor verification program, its not Wal-mart/Walgreeens/CVS Trustworth OTC stuff but its about as good as it can get for now...
Side note....anyone wanna try and crowdfund to setup a vertically integrated peptide synthetizing plant and do end user distribution state-side? Maybe need 2-4 mil startup....
@richardharris Stop using AI, for this it's it has all the crap of the internet in it and doesn't know whats real, and it's a bit like the snake eating it's own tail at this point as half the new information it quotes AI wrote to begin with.
User the Vendor Directory:
https://peptidecritic.com/vendor-directoryOr the Price Index:
https://peptidecritic.com/peptide-price-index -
@Mydogdaryl423
You quoted the whole reply, didn't snip anything and just read the last sentence. Clearly the last part is a joke.@richardharris said:
@Mydogdaryl423
You quoted the whole reply, didn't snip anything and just read the last sentence. Clearly the last part is a joke.Clearly my comment was a joke too. Guess that went right over your head when you were rage typing.
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R Randy moved this topic from Vendor Reviews & Orders on
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So as a fun side i went to chat GPT and asked for some peptide vendors, one of the top ones i saw (and was linked to) was a seemingly new vendor.
So some flags are waved at me and given the nature of E-commerce and the abundance of scammers i want to try and do as much due diligence to protect myself.
So from a business-flow standpoint and the fact that peptides can vary wildly in price it stands to reason that there is high-margin in the white-label operation everyone is engaging in. The moats people build for reputable supply chain tends to be branding...so how would a new vendor enter the market. Well any tom dick or harry can create a website take payment (and given the nature of grey-market) accept crypto/zelle only. This is red flag one for me. Its one thing to ship bad product but to black-hole payment with no recourse to potentially get nothing is truly a scam.
So then i look at, is there a product in existence? Does their COA match the company name from a more neutral third party website? Yes...but...i can't really match the company tested to the company's website, that link is dubious. Lets take my use case. The website is shopapexlabs.net Now, i can go through 99% of the process and see some things. The whois on the website is fairly new and obfuscated, not a bad practice given the nature of grey-market peptides and definitely not a bad idea for anonymity. But if i go to freedom diagnostics to look up the provided assentation number its just going to be APEXxxxxxxx Which would be good if there wasn't 100 different companies named APEX something or other....which leads me to wonder, how do i validate this isn't someone spoofing the APEX name and giving me a link to someone else's COA. not a Fake COA but just lying that that COA is for their company?
So now i'm stuck in a place...do i risk about $50 to shoot for the moon for something just to see if they ship it? From there do i even trust that if they send me a vial of white stuff i can trust the label and they aren't spoofing that as well?
Even if i sent it in for lab testing and shelled out another couple hundred on a whim, there's no real way to prove it was white-label product or proverbial snake oil.
But that brings me back to the real crux of everything. Is the risk that suppliers are taking to bring a product to market and making those Chinese connections really worth the likely 90-95% gross profit margins on products? Are they doing anything other than becoming middlemen? Why, if that's the case, are peptides seemingly still so prohibitively expensive for the layman given its small unit volume cost at scale (this is now a massive market)
And finally, how on earth is anyone supposed to break these barriers to entry to keep pressure on the supply side to allow for true market stabilization. It seems $10-20k PER peptide in just up front costs on the distributor to take a stab at trusting their original supplier. Is it really just marketing on their end to essentially last leg ship?
Right now im back to only allowing a credit card to be used, i will no longer attempt to use crypto/zelle but the utter lack of business transparency is really hurting this from a long time thing, and it feels like easy layup for the FDA to clamp down on grey-market stuff because of the inability to hold liable Chinese manufacturers and it seems like the only domestic players in the space are already a part of the bigger player's pipelines.
Anyway, thank god for this website and its vendor verification program, its not Wal-mart/Walgreeens/CVS Trustworth OTC stuff but its about as good as it can get for now...
Side note....anyone wanna try and crowdfund to setup a vertically integrated peptide synthetizing plant and do end user distribution state-side? Maybe need 2-4 mil startup....
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@richardharris I asked AI to respond and it said: go to peptide critic and look at the vendor listings
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@Commander Its the verb version of Suspicion used by GENZ people. So rather than saying Suspicioning its Sussing
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@Commander Its the verb version of Suspicion used by GENZ people. So rather than saying Suspicioning its Sussing
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@Commander Its the verb version of Suspicion used by GENZ people. So rather than saying Suspicioning its Sussing
@Superpep
As the mom of many GenZ's they use SUS for suspect, sketchy. Being GenX I would use sussing meaning sussing out (discovering, figuring out the truth). They would only understand SUSSING from context, and would not use it themselves. Not that any of that matters a whit!
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