Published methodology

How We Rank

Version 1.0 · Last updated 25 August 2026

The question this page answers

When we show you several places to buy the same product and put one at the top, what decided that order?

The short version: total cost to you, and whether the seller is a legitimate source. Nothing else. Not what we're paid, not who we work with, not who asked nicely.

What goes into the ranking

Three inputs. All three are observable — you can check every one of them yourself.

1 · Landed cost

Not the sticker price. The total a US customer actually pays to have the product in hand: item price plus shipping plus duty.

This distinction became essential in August 2025, when the US ended the $800 de minimis exemption and Korean goods settled at a 15% tariff. Since then the same bottle of essence can reach you at three different real costs depending on where you bought it — one retailer quotes duty-inclusive, another adds it at checkout, a third stays silent and lets a courier invoice you two weeks later.

A ranking on sticker price alone would now be actively misleading. We rank on what you pay.

2 · Authenticity

Whether the seller is an authorized source for that brand.

This is not a formality. Korean brands lost an estimated ₩1.5 trillion to counterfeits in 2024, and in one 2025 test purchase of a major Korean brand across US marketplaces, 26 of 29 items came back fake. Counterfeiters now clone barcodes and price at parity with the real product specifically to avoid looking suspicious.

Which is why the cheapest listing is not automatically our top result — and sometimes it is excluded entirely. A price well below every authorized source is a warning, not a bargain. If we can't establish that a seller is legitimate, we don't rank it above one we can.

3 · US reachability

Whether a US customer can complete the purchase and receive the product.

A site loading in English is not enough. Retailers that block US orders, refuse US shipping, or route US visitors to a separate regional storefront are not in the comparison — they're not options you actually have. Current exclusions and the reason for each are listed at the bottom of this page.

What is excluded from the ranking, absolutely

• The commission we earn. Rates differ by retailer. They are not an input, at any weight, in any tiebreaker.
• Whether we have an affiliate relationship at all. Retailers we earn nothing from are in the catalog and regularly rank first. Ulta and Sephora have both placed first on comparisons here, and we earn no commission from either. You can verify that against the table below.
• Whether a retailer or brand is a client of ours in any capacity.
• Any payment, from anyone, ever.

The ranking is computed, not decided

There is no editor's pick here. No manual override, no discretionary tiebreaker, no hand-placed “best value.” The order is produced by the method above running on observable data, which means anyone who disagrees with a result can recompute it and show us where we're wrong.

We are one person. We can't offer you a sales team walled off from a newsroom, so we don't claim one. What we offer instead is a ranking that doesn't depend on our restraint — it depends on arithmetic you can check.

If we ever can't compute a ranking without exercising judgment, we won't publish a ranking for that comparison.

What each retailer pays us

We earn affiliate commission on some outbound links. Here is the current position for every retailer in the catalog, including the ones that pay us nothing.

Commission rates across the retailers we do earn from range roughly from 1% to 15%, depending on the retailer and the product category. Those rates are set by the retailers, they change without notice, and — as stated above — none of them touch the ranking.

Eight of the thirteen retailers we compare currently earn us nothing — seven because we have no affiliate relationship with them at all, and Amazon because we haven't met their program threshold yet. Several of the largest are in that group, including Ulta, Sephora and YesStyle, and all three regularly place first.

Brand-direct stores. Some products are also available directly from the brand's own site. Those aren't retailers and aren't ranked as such, but for completeness: we hold affiliate relationships with two of them, ELOREA and GLASSFX. As with every retailer above, that has no bearing on where anything places.

Last updated: 25 August 2026. If you spot something out of date here, tell us and we'll fix it.

Catalog inclusion

The rule: a retailer is in the comparison if a US customer can complete a purchase and receive the product, and we can establish that it is a legitimate source.

Commission status is not part of that rule and never will be. We carry retailers whose affiliate programs we've never joined, ones that rejected us, ones we don't qualify for, and ones that have no program at all. They are ranked on exactly the same basis as everyone else and can place first. A comparison that only covers the retailers who pay us wouldn't be a comparison — it would be a storefront.

Currently excluded, with reasons:

Excluded retailers are re-checked each cycle — exclusion isn't permanent, it's current.

Versions and corrections

Method changes are published here with a version number, a date, and an explanation of what changed and why. We don't quietly adjust weights.

Corrections are made in place, promptly, with the original error left visible. We'd rather show you a mistake than edit one out of existence.

If you think a ranking here was influenced by money, tell us and we'll show you the computation. That offer is the reason the whole thing is built this way.

Related: The Independence Policy · Demand Index methodology