Why this page exists at all
Putting ten shops behind ten identical Buy buttons quietly implies they are the same kind of thing. On price they are not, which is the whole site. On age control they are not either, and that gap is the one with consequences.
So we read every vendor's published policy directly. What is below is what those policies say — not what the shops' marketing says, and not what we assumed. Where a policy did not answer the question, the row says not established instead of guessing, because the flattering guess and the true answer are not the same thing.
A vendor's willingness to ship somewhere is not evidence that it is legal to receive it there. Several will ship to countries where these products are banned, and their buyer-assumes-all-risk disclaimers do not transfer that to us. It is why the shelves filter on the law where you are, rather than on the vendor's own delivery dropdown.
What the age-check column means
These are four genuinely different things, and the difference is the point.
- ID
- A real identity check before the order ships — a verification service, a document upload, or a signature demanded at the door. The strongest of the four.
- Signature
- Adult signature required on delivery, with ID shown to the carrier rather than to the shop.
- Date of birth
- A date typed into a box at checkout. Nothing verifies it. Better than nothing only in the sense that it is a deliberate step.
- None
- No age step at that shop's own checkout that their policy describes.
- Not established
- We could not read their policy, so we are not claiming either way. This is deliberately not shown as "none": we have not established that, and it would be the flattering direction to guess wrong in.
Every shop we carry
Built from the same registry the shelves use, so it cannot drift out of step with what you are actually being sent to. Inferred marks a shipping zone we worked out from the storefront rather than read from a policy page.
| Shop | Age check at their checkout | Ships to | From | Typical time |
|---|
What we deliberately do not publish
Star ratings and review scores. We own no inventory and have no reviewers. Any rating we published would be decoration, and decoration on a trust page is worse than nothing.
Third-party reputation scores. Republishing each vendor's Trustpilot or BBB standing is a reasonable thing for this page to carry, and it is not here yet, for one reason: we have not been able to read those sources first-hand. Quoting a score we have not verified — on the page whose entire job is telling you what has been verified — would be self-defeating. When we can source and link them properly, they will appear here with the link, or not at all.
A "recommended vendor" badge. Every shelf is ranked by price per unit, in one currency, in stock. The ranking code does not know which shops pay us. Adding a badge on top would be the first place that stopped being true.
And how we get paid
Affiliate commission on some — not all — of the shops here. It costs you nothing extra, and it moves nothing up the page. Several shops in the table above pay us precisely nothing and are listed identically to the ones that do. If that ever stops being true, this paragraph is the one that should change first.
More questions, answered plainly →Policies were read directly and are re-checked periodically, but a shop can change its terms at any time and the shop's own policy is always the authority. Nicotia Market is a price comparison service. We hold no stock and sell nothing. Adults 21+ only.