Safe trading & verification

What our tiers mean, what they do not mean, and what remains your job.

Read this first

A verification tier tells you what we checked. It does not tell you that a company is honest, solvent, or capable of fulfilling your order. We are an introduction service: we never see the goods, never hold the money, and cannot recover it for you.

We deliberately never display the word “verified” on its own, because it invites exactly the wrong conclusion. Every badge names its specific tier instead.

The three tiers

Registered

An email address was confirmed. Company details were typed in by the company itself and nothing has been checked by us. Treat a registered company as an unverified stranger who has told you their name.

Documents checked

A person at Biovern looked at a business registration document or VAT certificate and formed the view that it appears genuine and matches the declared company. For EU companies, a VAT number may also have been checked against the European Commission’s VIES service.

What this does not establish:

that the company can supply what it lists, in the quantity or quality stated;
that it is financially sound, or will still exist next month;
that its products meet any standard, hold any certification, or are legal in your market;
that the person emailing you is the person the document names;
that a document which looked genuine to a human reviewer is in fact genuine.

Audited

A third-party audit report — for example SGS, TÜV, Bureau Veritas or Intertek — was provided and reviewed. The findings are the auditor’s, not ours. We checked that a report exists and relates to this company; we did not conduct, repeat or validate the audit, and an audit describes a site at the time it was visited, not the shipment you will receive.

What you should still do yourself

These are ordinary trade precautions. None of them is replaced by a tier on this site.

Check the company independently. Look it up in its national companies register. Verify an EU VAT number yourself via VIES.
Order a sample before a bulk order, and keep part of it — a retained sample is what makes a later quality dispute arguable.
Have your own written contract covering specification, tolerances, Incoterms, inspection rights, timelines and what happens when goods are rejected.
Use payment terms that leave you leverage. A full advance payment to a new counterparty in another jurisdiction is the single most common way businesses lose money in international trade. Consider a letter of credit or documentary collection.
Commission pre-shipment inspection for a significant order.
Confirm the goods are lawful where you are importing them, including registration, labelling and restriction rules. That obligation is yours as importer, not the seller’s and not ours.
Be suspicious of changed bank details. A mid-deal request to pay a different account is the classic invoice-redirection fraud. Confirm by voice on a number you already held.

Warning signs

Pressure to decide immediately, or a price far below the market.
A refusal to provide a sample, or to be inspected.
A bank account in a different name or country from the company.
Contact moving to a free email address after the introduction.
Certificates supplied as images that cannot be checked with the issuing body.

If something goes wrong

Tell us at info@biovern.eu. We can investigate, remove listings, and change or withdraw a tier — and we will, including where a document turns out to be false.

We want to be honest about the limit of that: we cannot recover your money. No payment passes through us, so there is nothing for us to reverse. A commercial dispute is between you and your counterparty, which is precisely why the precautions above matter more than any badge on this site.

To complain about something we did — a rejected listing, a tier decision, a removal — see complaints.