How we rank things

What we actually use

• Real customer ratings and review counts. A product with tens of thousands of ratings at 4.6 tells you something a slick product page can't. Volume matters as much as the score.
• Live prices. Prices on this site are pulled live from Amazon when the page loads, not saved from weeks ago. That means what you see is what you would pay right now.
• Reviews from beyond Amazon. For many branded products we also pull the rating for the same item from UK retailers such as Superdrug, LookFantastic, Holland & Barrett and Pets at Home. When a product is loved on Amazon but rated lower elsewhere, that gap is worth knowing, and we show it side by side with a link to each source so you can check it yourself.
• Repeat-buy logic. This site is about the things you rebuy. Cost per wash, per cup or per nappy usually matters more than the sticker price, so that's how we think about value.

Where the ratings come from, and how old they are

The star rating and rating count we show are Amazon's own, recorded from the product listing. They are not our score, and we never adjust them. Amazon recalculates both continuously, so a figure we recorded in July may differ from what the listing shows today. That is why every product page prints the date we recorded it next to the rating instead of presenting the number as live. Where we have done the editorial work we also publish our own BasketLab score, which is a separate thing and is always labelled as ours.

Prices work the other way round. They are never stored in the page: each one is requested from Amazon as the page loads, because a price written into an article is wrong within days. If a price fails to load, the page shows nothing rather than a stale number.

The BasketLab score, and how it differs from the Amazon rating

On pages where we've done the editorial work, we publish our own BasketLab score out of 5. It's deliberately separate from the Amazon customer rating, which we also show, clearly labelled, because the two answer different questions. The Amazon rating tells you what buyers thought. The BasketLab score is our judgement of whether the product is a sensible buy once evidence, price and fit are weighed together.

It's an evidence-and-value assessment, not a hands-on lab test. We don't claim to have physically tested these products, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.

Four criteria, each scored out of 5 and averaged, rounded to one decimal place:

• Evidence (out of 5). How much real-world feedback exists and how consistent it's. A 4.8 average from 40 buyers scores lower here than a 4.4 from 5,000, because a small sample hasn't been tested at scale.
• Value (out of 5). What it costs per use, dose or serving against genuine alternatives, not the shelf price in isolation.
• Suitability (out of 5). How cleanly it fits a defined need. Products with recurring caveats in reviews, such as taste or mixability complaints, score lower even when the headline rating is fine.
• Transparency (out of 5). How clearly the maker states what is in the product, at what strength, and what it's for. Proprietary blends with vague detail score lower.

This is why our score often differs from the Amazon rating, sometimes by a wide margin. A cheap supplement with a 4.8 average from a handful of reviews can score below 4 with us, and a product rated 3.9 for taste can still score well on value. Where we publish a score, the four component scores are shown on the page so you can see the reasoning rather than trusting a single number.

Only the products we've genuinely assessed carry a score. We don't assign scores to our wider catalogue, because a number we've not thought about is worth nothing to you.

What we don't do

• We don't invent ratings. If a product has no meaningful reviews yet, it's labelled as a new listing rather than given a made-up score.
• We don't call a 3-star product excellent. Our write-ups match the actual data. A mixed rating gets described as mixed.
• We don't take payment for placement. Brands can't buy a spot or a better verdict.
• We don't show stale prices. Where we display a price it's fetched live, never saved from weeks ago.
• We don't claim hands-on testing we've not done. Where a verdict is based on aggregated data rather than our own use, that's what it's.

About those "beyond Amazon" ratings

Where you see a Beyond Amazon panel, we've found the same product on a UK retailer's own site and read its rating there. Two honest caveats. First, we only show it when the retailer has a meaningful number of reviews, because a handful of ratings tells you nothing. Second, a shop's product rating measures the product, whereas a company's Trustpilot score measures the company's service, which is a different thing. We don't mix the two up, and we don't copy anyone's review text. We link to every source so you can read it at first hand.

How we choose what to compare

A comparison only earns a page if it's genuinely useful. Two products have to be real alternatives someone would actually cross-shop, there has to be a real trade-off between them, and we've to be able to say something specific and decisive. Comparing two nearly identical products from the same brand helps nobody, so we don't do it.

How we make money

When you buy through our links, Amazon pays us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Some pages also link to Amazon services such as Prime or Audible, where we earn a fixed fee if you sign up. This never changes what we recommend. Our full affiliate disclosure has the detail.

Keeping it current

Ratings and review counts are refreshed regularly, prices are live on every page load, and each review shows when it was last updated. Our product data was last refreshed on 20 September 2026. We currently track 2,915 products across 62 categories, and we would rather cover fewer things properly than list everything badly.

Spotted something wrong?

Prices move, products get reformulated and listings change hands. If something here looks out of date or plain wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.