How Long Has This Vendor Been Trading?

Short answer: A long-standing vendor has had more opportunities to be caught out, which is the whole of what age tells you. It is not a quality measure, and treating a new vendor as automatically worse is as unfounded as treating an old one as automatically safe.

What age actually measures

Exposure. A seller trading for four years has had four years in which a bad batch, a disappeared order or a fabricated certificate could have surfaced publicly. The absence of any such report across that period is meaningful in a way that absence across four months is not.

That is a statement about how much evidence exists, not about how good the seller is.

Where to look for a date that is not self-reported

Domain registration gives a floor, though privacy services obscure the owner and a domain can be bought aged. Forum history is usually more informative: the first unprompted mention of a vendor by someone who was not promoting it is a reasonable lower bound on when it started trading.

Archived copies of the site show when the catalogue and the claims first appeared, and whether they have changed materially since.

A changed domain is worth understanding, not fearing

Vendors change domains for ordinary reasons — a rebrand, a registrar problem, payment processing. They also change domains to escape a reputation. The two look identical from outside unless the vendor explains the move.

What distinguishes them is continuity: does the new site carry the old record, acknowledge the change, and keep the same lab history. A clean break with no reference to what came before is the pattern worth asking about.

Why we do not score age directly

Because it would advantage incumbency rather than evidence, and because it is the easiest thing on this list to manufacture. A purchased aged domain and a four-year trading history look the same in a registration record.

We record what we can establish about trading history on each vendor page and leave it out of the score.

The reasonable use of it

As a tiebreak, and as a prompt for a specific question. If two vendors are level on testing, origin and recourse, the one with a longer public record has simply had longer to be contradicted. That is a mild preference, not a finding.

What a long record does not protect against

Ownership changes, supplier changes and quality drift are all invisible in a domain registration date. A vendor can trade well for three years and badly in its fourth with no external signal until buyers notice.

This is why a current testing record outranks a long history in our rubric. Age tells you how much evidence could have accumulated; the recent record tells you what the vendor is doing now.

How to use archived copies properly

Comparing a vendor's claims across archived snapshots shows whether the story has been stable. A lab name that changed, a purity claim that rose without new reports, a guarantee that quietly disappeared — these are visible in minutes and are rarely looked for.

Stability is not the same as honesty, but instability that is never explained is a reasonable prompt for a direct question.