How to Vet a MOM Before You Order: Green Flags and Red Flags

Ordering from a mail order marijuana service in Canada is normally uneventful. You pick a shop, you send payment, a package shows up. The problem is that the shops which are not uneventful tend to look identical to the ones that are, right up until the tracking number never arrives.

Fifteen minutes of checking before your first order with a new shop removes most of that risk. Here is what that check looks like.

Start with the review history, not the menu

A glossy menu takes an afternoon to build. A two-year review history does not. Before anything else, look at what members have actually said about a shop over time.

What you are reading for:

How far back the reviews go. Steady feedback across many months beats a burst of five-star posts in one week.
What happens when something goes wrong. Every shop eventually has a late package or a missing item. The useful signal is whether the complaint got resolved, and how fast.
Whether the reviews describe specifics. "Great service" tells you nothing. "Ordered Tuesday, landed Thursday in Ontario, jar weighed heavy" tells you plenty.

You can read the full stream of member feedback on the reviews page, or open any shop's own page from the MOM directory to see its history in one place.

Green flags

A listing status of Established. On MOM Index, shops are marked New, Established, Inactive or Blacklisted. Established means a track record, not an advertising budget.
Shipping terms written down. Cut-off times, carrier, typical transit days, what happens to a lost package. Shops that have shipped a lot of orders have learned to spell this out.
More than one payment method. Options are a sign of an operation that plans to be around next month.
Prices that sit in a normal range. Good deals exist. Prices far under everyone else usually mean older stock, lighter jars, or a shop that will not be answering emails in three weeks.
Their own photos. Reverse image search is free. Menu photos that appear on five other sites are a bad start.
A presence where people can talk back. Shops that take part in the community forum, where complaints are public and permanent, are accepting a level of scrutiny that fly-by-night operations avoid.

Red flags

Brand new, with the loudest discount on the market. New is not disqualifying by itself. New plus an unbeatable offer plus pressure to order today is a pattern worth stepping away from.
No way to reach a human before you pay. Send a simple pre-sale question. A shop that cannot answer an email before taking your money will not answer one after.
Reviews that all sound the same. Same sentence length, same enthusiasm, same week, no specifics.
A menu copied from a bigger shop. Identical product names, identical descriptions, identical photos, lower prices.
Pressure to move payment off the normal rails. Any shop insisting on an unusual payment route "just this once" is asking you to give up whatever recourse you had.
A Blacklisted marker. If a shop is flagged, the reason is generally in the reviews. Read them before deciding it does not apply to you.

The fifteen-minute check

Look the shop up in the directory and note its status and rating.
Read the three most recent reviews and the three worst ones, not just the top of the page.
Check where the shop sits in the rankings, which are built from member review volume and ratings rather than from who paid for placement.
Search the shop's name on the forum and read the threads, including the old ones.
Send one pre-sale question and see how long the answer takes.
Place a small first order. Not the ounce. Not the bulk deal. The smallest thing that tells you whether the packaging, the weight and the transit time match what was promised.

After your first order, close the loop

The reason this check works for anyone is that other people did it first and wrote down what happened. When your order lands, leave a review with the details that would have helped you: province, transit time, how the jar weighed, what the packaging looked like, whether support answered.

That is the whole mechanism. A directory is only as good as the last hundred reviews in it.

Final thoughts

No checklist makes an order risk-free, and anyone promising that is selling something. What a check like this does is shift the odds heavily in your favour, for about fifteen minutes of work. Start with the shops that have history, order small the first time, and write up what happened so the next person gets an easier decision than you did.

Browse current shops in the MOM directory, or see what the community is rating highest right now in the rankings.