Third-Party Tests

Why this page exists: On most certificates the client who submitted the sample is also the vendor selling it. Those are vendor self-tests. A smaller set of certificates are ordered by someone else entirely — a buying group, a community testing pool, an individual buying off the shelf — and on those the client field carries the tester's name while the vendor being tested appears in a separate field. Until now RV filed those under the tester, which meant a third-party result on a vendor's product did not appear when you searched that vendor.

How a test is classified: a certificate is tagged Third-party when the submitting client is a distinct party from the vendor named on the same certificate. Distinctness is decided conservatively: the two names are normalised (URLs, e-mail addresses, punctuation and generic words like “peptides”, “labs” and “biotech” stripped), then compared for exact match, containment, close spelling, and initialisms — so Cocer Peptides and cocerpeptides.com, or Guangzhou Jeep Biotechnology and JP, are treated as one party, not two. Anything that survives all of those checks is treated as genuinely two parties.

Every tagged certificate is linked below. The tag describes who ordered the test. It is not a quality judgement, and it does not mean a vendor self-test is less accurate — an independently ordered test simply removes one assumption, because the submitter had no commercial interest in the result.

Vendor-run testing programs

These certificates carry a name that reads like an independent tester — “test group”, “independent testing”, “QC” — but the vendor named on the same certificate resolves to the same party. They are listed separately rather than counted as third-party, because the submitter and the seller are the same. This is not necessarily improper; an in-house QC program is a normal thing to run. It is separated so the third-party count means what it says.

Limits of this page. The tag can only be applied where the certificate names both parties. Where a certificate shows only one name, or the vendor field is blank or reads “Unknown”, no tag is assigned — absence of a tag is not evidence a test was vendor-ordered. A tester who uses a name indistinguishable from the vendor's will also be missed. The counts here are therefore a floor, not a census, and will rise as more certificates are read. Classification is recomputed on every data build; if you believe a certificate is tagged wrongly, the underlying certificate is linked on each row so it can be checked directly.