Methodology
How products are researched and reviewed
Automation does the reading. People make the decisions.
1. Finding brands
Every two weeks our discovery process looks for brands with relevant pregnancy, postpartum and baby products and credible signals — certifications, specific material disclosure, EU availability. It suggests candidates; it never approves anything. An editor decides which brands are worth cataloguing.
2. Reading the catalogue
For qualified brands we read official product pages, preferring structured data and product feeds over scraping. We respect robots.txt and rate limits, and we never work around logins, CAPTCHAs or other access controls — if a site cannot be read automatically, we research it by hand.
3. Collecting evidence
We extract materials, ingredients, claims and certifications, keeping the exact quote and its source for every fact. Software, including AI, may help read and organise pages, but it is not allowed to fill gaps: a claim without a verbatim quote from a source is discarded, and nothing becomes “verified” because a product page says so.
| Evidence | Examples | How we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Strongest | Certification registries, authority databases, product certificates, lab reports for the exact product, technical data sheets | Normal basis for “verified” |
| Official brand | The product page, ingredient or material declarations | “Brand-declared” claims |
| Retailers | Retailer product pages and feeds | Price, stock and shipping; prompts us to look for primary sources |
| Editorial | Articles, reviews, blogs | Discovery only — never the final basis |
4. Rules, then a reviewer
Each fact is checked against the Standard's rules for every product category. The result is a recommendation — pass candidate, hold, fail or review — and a reviewer reads the evidence before anything is published. No product appears on European Edit without that human approval.
5. Where to buy
Products and shop offers are separate records. We list a retailer only when we have verified, from its shipping policy, checkout or feed, that it delivers to Sweden. An EU web address alone is never taken as proof. Every shop we link to dispatches from inside the EU, so there are no customs charges or import VAT at the door; the one exception, iHerb, charges Swedish VAT at checkout. Offers are ordered by Sweden shipping, stock, Swedish retailer and price.
6. Staying current
- Prices and stock are refreshed regularly; each offer shows when it was last checked.
- Links and Sweden shipping are re-confirmed at least every 90 days.
- Materials and ingredients are re-checked at least every 180 days.
- If a product page changes its materials, ingredients, certifications or claims, the listing is paused for review. A price change alone never triggers this.
Our crawler
Our software identifies itself as EuropeanEditBot, follows robots.txt and keeps a polite request rate. Brands can contact us to correct information or provide evidence; they cannot pay for a result.