5 Tips to Avoid Online CBD Scams

Online shopping is a very popular way to get access to CBD products. Buying online gives you access to better prices, more variety, and more discretion. However, there are also extra risks associated with online CBD shopping, as many scammers have jumped on the CBD craze in an effort to make easy money. If you are looking to buy CBD online in the near future, here’s how you can protect yourself from those scams.

1 – Avoid retailers and resellers

Amazon.com banned the sale of CBD products on its platform years ago, and yet you can still find CBD being sold on their website. Many of those products are actually hemp-seed oil trying to pass for CBD, which is a practice meant to prey on uninformed consumers. Hemp seed oil does have health benefits, but it contains no significant amounts of CBD.

Many CBD scammers operate as resellers on the platforms of major retailers. They constantly switch accounts and change their branding in order to stay out of trouble, which makes it harder to keep track of the scammers amidst legitimate resellers. 

The good news is that you don’t need to rely on resellers if you want to buy CBD. Most CBD manufacturers — including Cibdol — let regular consumers buy their products on their homepage. Buying from manufacturers is safer and cheaper than dealing with a reseller.

2 – Judge the book by the cover

The CBD market is worth millions of dollars, and manufacturing the substance is incredibly expensive. This means that most legitimate CBD manufactures have the bank necessary to invest in decent marketing and create a professional website. If you open the homepage of a manufacturer and are greeted by a cheap-looking site that takes forever to load, chances are, that’s not the site of a real manufacturer.

3 – Look up online reviews

Many manufacturers put customer reviews front and center on their website. Those reviews are a good place to start your research, but don’t trust those too much. Scammers can easily create sites filled with fake reviews. In order to make sure a brand is legitimate, you need to look up reviews on third-party websites, preferably sites that verify if the reviews are coming from real customers.

It can also be useful to check a brand’s reputation on social media.

4 – Find the test results

It is increasingly becoming common practice for CBD manufacturers to have their products tested by third-party laboratories. Those results are then posted on the company’s website, in order to prove that their products actually deliver what was promised on the label. When you look into a manufacturer, see if they adopt this practice, as these test results can prove the quality of their products.

5 – Contact customer support

Scammers often don’t have the time or resources necessary to maintain a proper customer support network. Therefore, one of the simplest ways to check if a manufacturer is legitimate is to contact customer support and ask them simple questions. Their response — if it arrives at all — will also help you gauge how helpful said customer support is, which can give you some peace of mind if you decide to spend hundreds of pounds on that brand.