Buying CBD oil online is riskier than you may realize. The market is growing fast, and regulations are slow to keep up. Combine that with a general like of information among customers, and the result is a market that is ripe with scammers trying to make a quick buck at your expense. Some of them are peddling low-quality products, while others are trying to sell stuff that contains no CBD at all.
If you are looking to buy CBD yourself, here are some steps you should take. These will help make sure you get what you expect out of your next online CBD purchase.
Step 1 – Find manufacturers
One rookie mistake is to try to buy CBD products from large web stores like Amazon or eBay. Those platforms house a large number of legitimate CBD sellers, but they also have many deceptive products for sale. And it’s hard to discern which is which based on the information available on the platform alone. You can buy positive Amazon reviews in bulk, after all.
Instead, you should look for the site of CBD manufacturers online. These are companies who buy hemp and extract the CBD from it, and who may even grow the hemp themselves. By cutting out people in the middle, you can get a better price, and it becomes easier to verify the quality of the product you are buying.
2 – Explore the manufacturer’s website
In this age of content marketing, the manufacturer you are considering will likely have a blog and many other learning resources on their website. This is also useful to help inform the general public about the products, as many still don’t quite understand how CBD works and what it can do.
Spend a few minutes browsing these information sources. See if you spot any wild health claims that raise your eyebrows. CBD is useful enough that you can sell it without exaggerating its benefits, so any wild claims — such as stating that CBD can cure cancer or AIDS — should be considered a red flag. Seek to work with manufacturers who are straightforward and down to earth.
Incidentally, CBD can help cancer patients. But it helps with the pain and nausea associated with chemotherapy, not with the tumors themselves. Not as far as we know, anyway — research is still underway.
3 – Read user reviews
When looking for user reviews, it’s important to actually verify them. Don’t just trust the information on the manufacturer’s website. Look for reviews on third party platforms, and skim a couple of them to see if they seem legitimate. Most fake websites are aimed at impulse buyers who don’t double-check anything — don’t be part of that group.
4 – Look for test results
Finally, the best marker of a reliable manufacturer is making their product’s test results available online. The only way to make sure a CBD product contains what it says in the bottle is to have it tested by a third party. As a result, honest manufacturers will often hire third parties to test each batch of their CBD, and then make those test results easy to find on their own website.
If you’d like an example of that, look at how Cibdol does business.