Red Flags When Buying Supplements Online: What to Check Before You Pay

A few months ago I bought five bottles of Alpha Brain from a website I had never used before, because the price was below what we pay Onnit as their official Irish stockist. That is not a keen price. That is a price which should not exist anywhere in the supply chain.

They took a month to arrive. What turned up was not Onnit's packaging. I have been selling this product since 2013 and I knew from across the room.

The full story is its own article, coming in a few weeks: who the seller turned out to be, where they are registered, what a regulator has since said about them, and how to spot a fake bottle at a glance. It is called "I Bought Fake Chinese Supplements Off the Internet So You Don't Have To". This piece is the part you can use straight away.

We sell supplements online, so read all of this with that in mind. Read it knowing that somebody who does this for a living, who buys direct from the brand, still put five fakes in a basket because a number looked good.

The market has got worse, not better. Marketplaces made it trivial to list a bottle with a professional label, and generative tools made it trivial to conjure a brand, a backstory and a wall of five-star reviews in an afternoon. The good news is that nearly every warning sign below takes under two minutes to check, and none of them need you to know anything about the ingredient itself.

The two-minute checklist

Before buying from a supplement site you do not already know:

• Can you find a real company name, a real postal address and a phone number that a person answers?
• Where does the parcel physically ship from, and does the checkout show the final price?
• Is the seller the brand itself, an authorised stockist, or an anonymous marketplace account?
• Is there a batch number, an expiry date and a named manufacturer?
• Do the claims on the page match what is actually permitted in the EU?
• Is the price far below everyone else, and do the reviews read like people or like a script?

Two or more failures and we would close the tab. Here is why each one matters.

Red flag 1: you cannot tell who you are buying from

This filters out most of the bad actors on its own.

A real shop tells you who it is: a trading name, a company registration, an address that is not a mailbox, a phone number. If the About page is three paragraphs of stock photography and mission-statement filler with no named humans and no address, that is not a stylistic choice.

It matters for recourse, not sentiment. If the product arrives wrong, or the batch turns out contaminated, or the charge does not match the order, you need somebody who can be held to it. An anonymous storefront cannot be, and neither can a marketplace account that will be deleted and re-registered under a new name by the weekend.

For an Irish company you can check the name against the Companies Registration Office register at cro.ie in about thirty seconds. Ours is on our About page, with the phone number, 01 539 0000, answered by somebody in Dublin.

Red flag 2: it ships from outside the EU, and the site is quiet about it

This one changed in July and a lot of people have not caught up yet.

Until 1 July 2026, parcels arriving into Ireland from outside the EU worth 150 euro or less came in without customs duty. That relief is gone. A 3 euro duty now applies per distinct item, VAT goes on top including VAT on the duty itself, and if the retailer did not collect it at checkout the courier will want it from you before they hand the parcel over, usually with an administration fee attached (Revenue). So a three-product order from a US site picks up duty on each line, plus VAT, plus a handling fee, and you find out at the door.

Revenue's own guidance warns that a site can look Irish or EU-based, using a .ie domain or euro prices, while the goods ship from outside the EU entirely.

Worth being precise about what a .ie does tell you, because it is not nothing. Every application to the Irish registry is checked, and the applicant has to prove their identity and a real connection to the island of Ireland (.IE), a far higher bar than .com, where availability is the only test. But it verifies the holder, not the warehouse. An Irish-registered company drop-shipping from another continent passes that test completely and still lands you with the charges.

So treat the domain as a weak positive and ask the direct question: where does this ship from, and is the checkout price the final price? A shop shipping from inside the EU will say so plainly, because it is an advantage. A shop that buries it is telling you something.

We ship from Dublin. Order by 4pm and it goes the same day, with no customs step and no surprise at the door. Our delivery information sets out what that means.

Red flag 3: the seller is a marketplace account rather than the brand or an authorised stockist

Counterfeits are not a fringe problem and they are not confined to obscure products. They concentrate on exactly the brands people search for by name.

A CNBC investigation in September 2025 found counterfeit versions of well-known supplements sold through third-party sellers on Walmart's marketplace, with misspellings on the bottles giving them away (CNBC). Amazon has had the same problem for years.

The pattern is consistent: the more a product is talked about, the more attractive it is to fake. Anything that picks up a celebrity or podcast mention becomes a target within weeks, which is why Alpha Brain is a textbook case, largely off the association with Joe Rogan.

What ours actually looked like

The giveaway was the packaging, and not subtly.

A genuine Alpha Brain bottle is orange and black, carries the ONNIT name down the side, and has the registered trademark symbol after the product name. What arrived was a black bottle covered in botanical line drawings with a stock photograph of a white flower on it, "Daily Cognitive Support" set in a script font, no trademark symbol, and the brand's own name nowhere on the front at all.

What it loosely resembles is packaging Onnit used years ago and discontinued. Whoever produced it was working from an out-of-date reference, and even measured against that old design it is a poor job. The proportions are wrong and the typography does not hold together.

The real tell is underneath. Turn both bottles over and the genuine one carries a crisp laser-etched code: a lot number and an expiry date. The counterfeit has a manufacture date and an expiry date, printed twice and slightly ghosted, and no lot number at all.

That omission is not an oversight. Dates make a bottle look legitimate at a glance. A lot number is what makes a recall possible, which is the last thing anybody selling counterfeits wants attached to their product. Red flag 5 covers why that matters to you.

The parcel also included a free gift I had neither asked for nor wanted: a small bottle of penis enlargement oil. It is still in the drawer, unopened. A supplier who thinks that belongs in a box with a cognitive supplement is telling you something useful about the rest of their catalogue, and it lines up precisely with red flag 6.

I am not naming the seller here. That is for the follow-up. What is useful today is the shape, because the shape repeats: an unfamiliar site, a price that could not be real, a month between the order and the doorbell, and a review profile stacked with near-identical five-star entries. For the record, the counterfeit judgement is mine, based on thirteen years of handling the real thing and on the two bottles in the photograph.

The defence is simple. Buy from the brand, or from a stockist the brand actually recognises. We are the official Irish stockist for Onnit, which is why the Alpha Brain on our shelf came from Onnit and not from a middleman. If a site claims to be an authorised stockist, the brand's own website will usually confirm it, and a two-line email to the brand will settle it either way.

Red flag 4: the claims on the page are not legal here

This is the fastest tell of the lot, and almost nobody uses it.

In Ireland and across the EU, food supplements are regulated as food, not as medicine. Any nutrition or health claim made about a food supplement has to comply with Regulation (EC) No. 1924/2006, and the permitted and non-authorised claims are set out in an EU register that specifies the exact wording and the conditions attached to it (FSAI). That is why you see careful phrasing like "contributes to the normal function of the immune system" on a compliant vitamin D label. It is not marketing timidity. It is the authorised wording.

So when a page tells you a capsule will cure, treat, heal, reverse or prevent something, the seller is either unaware of the rules or has decided they do not apply to them. Neither is a reason to give them your card details. The same goes for before-and-after photographs, doctor-in-a-white-coat imagery with no named doctor, and any variation on "big pharma does not want you to know".

Two things worth knowing about how this works here. Supplements placed on the Irish market for the first time must be notified to the FSAI, but notification is registration, not approval. Anybody advertising a product as "FSAI approved" is describing something that does not exist. And medicinal ingredients and unauthorised novel foods are not permitted in supplements at all, which is precisely why some things you can buy freely on a US site are not on sale here. If a seller is shipping you something that cannot legally be sold in Ireland, everything else they have told you is worth less.

We have written separately about the EU proposals that would tighten this further. We are not uncritical fans of all of it, but the claims regime is the part that protects you, and a seller ignoring it is a seller ignoring you.

Red flag 5: the documentation is missing or unverifiable

A batch number is what makes a recall possible. Without it, a manufacturer who finds a contaminated run cannot tell you whether yours is affected. An expiry date says the product was made to a schedule rather than sitting in a shed. A named manufacturer says somebody has accepted legal responsibility for what is inside. Counterfeits often fall down here first, with missing lot codes, dates in the wrong place, or a font that does not match the rest of the label, because the people printing them are copying artwork rather than running a production line.

Third-party testing is the same idea one level up, and it matters most for sports supplements where a contaminated batch can end a career. But a logo on a web page is just an image file, and certification attaches to specific products and often specific batches. NSF publishes a searchable directory where you can look a product up by name, company or lot number. If a product claims certification and is not in the certifier's own database, treat the claim as false rather than as an oversight. The same goes for a certificate of analysis: a reputable seller will send you one for a specific batch if you ask, and a vague "third-party tested" badge with nothing behind it is decoration.

Red flag 6: the category itself is high risk

Some corners of the market are far more heavily adulterated than others.

An analysis in JAMA Network Open examined the US Food and Drug Administration's database of tainted products marketed as dietary supplements between 2007 and 2016 and concluded that active pharmaceuticals continued to be identified in dietary supplements, particularly those marketed for sexual enhancement or weight loss, even after the FDA had issued warnings. The analysis covered 776 products from 146 companies. That is US data and Ireland is not the same market, but the products travel and the categories are identical.

Ireland has its own version of the picture. The HPRA detained 763,027 dosage units of falsified and other illegal medicines in 2025, including just under 14,000 individual packages each linked to a separate purchase by a member of the public, a threefold increase in individual consignments on the previous year. Those are medicines rather than supplements, but the overlap is exactly where the danger sits: products sold as supplements that turn out to contain prescription drugs, and prescription drugs dressed up as supplements.

Weight loss, muscle building and sexual performance are the three categories where scepticism should be highest. Not because nothing in them works, but because they attract the people willing to put something undeclared in a capsule.

Red flag 7: the price and the reviews do not add up

Supplements have real input costs. A genuine standardised extract costs meaningfully more to produce than a bag of milled powder, and there is a floor below which the sums do not work. When a listing sits far below every other seller of the identical product it is close to expiry, diverted through a grey supply chain, or not the product at all. Occasionally it is a real clearance, in which case the discount is modest and the seller says why.

Knowing that is not the same as being immune to it. The listing at the top of this article did not catch me with a slightly keen price. It caught me with a price no legitimate link in the chain could have offered, which should have been the end of it and was instead the reason I clicked.

Reviews are the other half of the same tell. Real review sets are lumpy: they cluster on the popular sizes, they include a few articulate complaints about delivery, and they arrive unevenly over months. Fake ones are smooth. Hundreds of five-star ratings inside a fortnight, uniform sentence length, reviewers praising a product without ever describing using it, and not one negative review on a listing with thousands of ratings. Genuinely good products still get one-star reviews from people whose parcel was late. Check them on a platform the seller does not control.

A worked example: shilajit

Shilajit is the clearest illustration of all of this. It is expensive to source properly, comes from high-altitude rock in a handful of regions, and is one of the most counterfeited supplements on the market. Cheap imitations are routinely bulked with additives, and heavy metals are a real concern with poorly sourced resin. It is also close to impossible to judge from a product photograph, which is the whole problem.

Our guide to telling real shilajit from fake walks through the specific checks, and the Altai resin we stock is the version we would put up against them ourselves.

Frequently asked questions

Is it safe to buy supplements online at all?

Yes, with the same care you would apply to anything else bought online. The risk is not the internet, it is anonymity. A named business with a real address, a verifiable stockist relationship and clear shipping terms is no riskier than a shop on the high street. An anonymous listing at a suspiciously low price is a different proposition entirely.

How can I tell if a supplement is counterfeit after it arrives?

Compare it against images on the brand's own site, and check the batch number, expiry date, safety seal, spelling and print quality. If anything is off, stop using it and send the brand photographs. Most take counterfeits seriously and will tell you quickly.

Does the FSAI approve supplements sold in Ireland?

No. Supplements must be notified to the FSAI before first going on sale here, but notification is registration, not approval. Any seller advertising a product as "FSAI approved" is describing something that does not exist.

Will I be charged customs on supplements ordered from a UK or US website?

Since 1 July 2026, orders arriving into Ireland from outside the EU attract a 3 euro customs duty for each distinct item in the parcel where the goods are valued at 150 euro or below, plus VAT, and usually a handling fee from the courier or postal operator if it was not collected at checkout. Great Britain counts as outside the EU for this. Goods that are already inside the EU when you order them are not affected.

The bottom line

Almost nobody gets caught out because they misunderstood the pharmacology. They get caught out because they did not check who was selling it, where it was shipping from, and what the label was legally allowed to say. Three questions, two minutes, and they filter out the overwhelming majority of what is wrong with this market.

Ask them of us as readily as you would of anyone else. If you want to see how we write about our own products when the evidence is thin, our beginner's guide to nootropics and our longer piece on whether nootropics actually work are the honest version of that exercise.

We have been at this since 2013 and we ship from Dublin. If you are unsure about something specific, ring us on 01 539 0000 or email info@powerful.ie and we will tell you what we know, including when the honest answer is that the evidence is thinner than the marketing.

This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting a supplement, particularly if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or taking prescription medication.