Why ValidShop exists

A few years ago a scam shop was easy to spot. The photos were stolen, the text was full of mistakes and the design looked like it was made in a hurry. That is no longer a reliable sign.

With AI, someone with bad intentions can now produce a clean design, product descriptions that read well and a stack of invented reviews in the time it takes to drink a coffee. They can copy the look of a real store, launch it, collect payments for a few weeks and disappear. Then they do it again under a new name.

You should not need a trained eye to tell the difference. That is the gap we are trying to close.

The first group is the shopper. Anyone can be caught out when a price looks good and the checkout looks professional, and the money is usually gone before the doubt sets in.

The second group is less obvious: honest store owners. Every fake shop makes people a little more suspicious of the real ones. A small shop that does everything right pays for the scammers' behaviour with lost sales. A clear, public trust check helps good stores stand out for the right reasons.

ValidShop only has value if you can believe the result. So the rules are simple, and they do not change depending on who is asking.

• Every store is checked in the same way, with the same criteria.
• A score cannot be bought. A store with a low or risky result cannot pay to score higher, and no amount of money changes that.
• Store owners cannot pay to have a result hidden or softened.
• The only way to a better score is to fix the things that lowered it.

If a store improves, the next check will show it. If a result is wrong, because something could not be reached when we looked, tell us and we will check again. That is a correction, not a favour.

The people most at risk are often the ones least able to pay for advice, and the check is only useful if people actually run it before they buy. So there is no account, no subscription and no limit on how many shops you can look up.

We would rather have a trustworthy tool that everyone uses than a paid one that few people see. It also keeps us honest: with no advertisers and no paying stores, there is nobody to please except the person reading the result.

A score is a snapshot of what we could see on the day we looked. It is a strong signal, not a guarantee. A high score does not promise a perfect experience, and a low one does not prove that a store is a scam. Pages can be unreachable, protected by security tools or temporarily down, and that can pull a result down.

Use it as one input next to your own judgement. You can read how it is built in the how it works section, and every store page shows the breakdown behind its score.

Found a shop that scored better than it should, or a result that looks unfair? Write to us through the contact form. If you own a store, see how to claim it and how to improve your score.