How We Verify a Merchant in Under 30 Minutes
When an affiliate manager reaches out to us, or when a reader asks why we haven't reviewed brand X yet, the honest answer is usually the same: we haven't finished verification. Before any listing goes live on CompassPicks, an editor walks through the checklist below. It takes 20 to 40 minutes and kills roughly one in three candidate merchants. Here's the whole thing — you can borrow it for your own shopping.
Step 1 — Find a real address and a real phone number (5 minutes)
Scroll to the footer. Check the "About" or "Contact" page. We want a registered street address (not a PO box) and a phone number that someone would pick up. If both are missing, the review ends here — we won't list a merchant we can't physically locate.
Where possible we cross-check the address against the local business registry (Companies House for the UK, state SOS databases for the US). The registered business name should match what's shown on the site.
Step 2 — Read the returns policy end to end (5 minutes)
Not the summary. The full returns page. We're looking for:
- Return window: 14 days is the legal floor in much of Europe; 30 days is the baseline we expect.
- Who pays return shipping: "Customer pays" is acceptable; "customer pays international return shipping on a defective item" is a red flag.
- Restocking fees: anything above 15% goes in the "cons" section of the review.
- Refund timing: "within 30 days of receipt" is standard; "within 60 days" starts to feel like a float game.
Step 3 — Test the checkout (5 minutes)
We add a low-cost item to the cart and walk to the payment page without completing the purchase. We're watching for:
- HTTPS on every step, including the cart
- Surprise fees that only appear at the last screen
- Forced account creation (acceptable, but it's a con)
- Dark-pattern upsells (pre-ticked add-ons, "limited time" countdowns that reset on refresh)
Step 4 — Triangulate independent reviews (10 minutes)
We pull the merchant's Trustpilot score, Sitejabber score, and BBB rating (if applicable). We read the most recent 20 reviews end to end — sorted by date, not by helpfulness — and note the themes. One angry reviewer is noise. The same word appearing in five recent reviews ("delayed", "cheap", "unresponsive") is signal.
If the merchant's aggregate rating is below 3.5 or the recent trajectory is downward, we usually pass.
Step 5 — Check for obvious red flags (5 minutes)
A quick Whois lookup on the domain tells us how old it is. A brand-new domain with polished copy and thousands of Instagram reviews is suspicious. We also search the brand name plus the word "scam" or "refund" — not because every complaint is valid, but because patterns emerge quickly if there are structural problems.
Step 6 — Final judgment call (5 minutes)
Once the checks are done, an editor writes a one-paragraph verdict — pass, fail, or pending — and the reasoning. If it's a pass, we draft the review. If it's pending (for example, we need to wait for a test purchase to arrive), we park it. If it's a fail, we note why and move on.
What this process isn't
It isn't a guarantee. Merchants change over time, which is why we re-verify on a 90-day schedule. It also isn't a substitute for your own judgment — we publish our reasoning precisely so you can disagree with it. But it's enough to filter out the vast majority of merchants we genuinely wouldn't send a friend to.