Methodology
How We Evaluate
Disclosure
Falmori scores one narrow thing: what a store tells you before you pay. Not whether a product is good, not whether one store is better than another — only how completely it explains packaging, billing, returns, privacy, and materials up front. This page explains exactly how that score is built, where the evidence comes from, and what it cannot tell you.
The five things we check
We check five things a store either explains publicly or does not:
- Material disclosure — whether the store names what a product is actually made of.
- Discreet shipping — whether the store states how a parcel arrives and what appears on the outside.
- Billing descriptor — whether the store states what name will appear on a card or bank statement.
- Return policy — whether the store publishes its return terms, including any restrictions on intimate items.
- Privacy policy — whether the store publishes a readable privacy policy.
We chose these five because each one is a question people actually ask before buying something private, and each one can be verified by anyone from a store's own public pages. If a claim cannot be checked from a public source, it is not in the score.
How the score is calculated
Each of the five checks is graded on the same three-point scale:
| Grade | Points | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Disclosed | 1 | The store states this clearly and publicly. |
| Partly disclosed | 0.5 | The store addresses it, but incompletely or ambiguously. |
| Not disclosed | 0 | We could not find the store stating this publicly. |
The five grades are added together, giving a result out of 5. Multiplied by 20, that becomes a Disclosure Score from 0 to 100 — the number used in this page's structured data.
There is no weighting, no editorial adjustment, and no judgment about product quality anywhere in this formula. The same rule is applied to every store, in the same order, every time.
Why bananas
Because a star rating would be a lie about what this is.
Stars, percentages, and letter grades all carry a built-in claim: an authority has assessed quality. We are not an authority, we do not test products, and we are not assessing quality — we are counting how many of five public disclosures a store actually makes. Borrowing the visual language of a safety certification for a checklist would invite exactly the misreading we most need to avoid.
A banana makes no such claim. It is unmistakably our own unit, not an industry standard, and nobody mistakes it for a seal of approval. It also keeps the page from feeling clinical about a subject people are often already tense about.
Five bananas is full marks — one banana for each of the five checks. The rating is not a separate opinion layered on top of the data; it is the checklist itself, drawn.
How to read the bananas
Every store is shown with the same five banana slots, so you can see at a glance both what a store discloses and what it leaves out:
| Shown | Means | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 🍌 Full banana | Disclosed | 1 |
| 🍌 Half banana | Partly disclosed | 0.5 |
| Faded outline | Not disclosed | 0 |
So a store showing three full bananas, one half, and one faded slot has disclosed three of the five checks, addressed a fourth incompletely, and said nothing public about the fifth. That is a Disclosure Score of 70.
- The faded slots are deliberate. Most rating systems show you only what a business earned. We show the empty slots at the same size, because on this site the missing information is the point.
- Full marks are not rare, and that is a real finding, not a broken scale. Most stores we have checked disclose most of these things; the interesting differences are usually in one or two specific checks. We would rather show a lot of stores near the top than stretch the scale to manufacture drama.
What this score does not mean
Full marks means a store explains a lot before you pay. That is all it means. Specifically, it does not mean:
- that the store's products are good, safe, or right for you;
- that the store is more trustworthy, better run, or more likely to handle your order well;
- that a policy is favorable — a clearly written return policy can still be a restrictive one. We score whether it is stated, not whether you will like it;
- that a low-scoring store is doing anything wrong. Some stores simply do not publish this information, which is a fact about the page, not an accusation about the company.
We do not test products, we do not rank stores by quality, and we do not certify anyone.
Where the evidence comes from
Every graded check is recorded with a source URL, a short quotation or summary of the relevant wording, and the date we checked it. Each cell in the comparison table links to the source behind it, so you can check our reading against the original.
We use the store's own public pages as the primary source — product pages, shipping and returns pages, privacy policies, and FAQs. Where a store's own wording is ambiguous, we grade it partly disclosed and say why, rather than resolving the ambiguity in either direction on the store's behalf.
A faded slot means we could not find it, not that it does not exist. If a store publishes something we missed, we want to know — see below.
How often we update it, and how to correct us
Policies change, and a score is only as good as its date. Every record carries the date it was last checked, and we re-verify periodically and whenever we are told something has changed.
If you work for a store we have scored, or you are a reader who found something we missed, email editorial@falmori.com with a link to the public page. If the page supports a different grade, we change the grade and update the date. Supporting evidence changes a score. Nothing else does.
Commercial independence
Falmori does not currently sell products, run advertising, or earn commission from any store in this comparison.
If we ever add affiliate links, these rules apply and will not be quietly changed:
- Scores are fixed before any commercial relationship, and are never recalculated because of one. The methodology on this page was finalized and published before any affiliate arrangement existed.
- Every store stays in the table, and low-scoring stores keep their links. We will not show links only for stores that score well — that would turn a disclosure record into a recommendation list.
- Any commercial relationship is disclosed on the same screen as the score, not buried in a footer.
We score what stores disclose. It would be a strange way to run that if we were not clear about our own.