Why registration is required to view the catalog

The product catalog is withheld until a visitor has registered and signed in. Every visitor — a researcher, a search engine, an automated crawler — receives the same registration page in its place, with no product information on it. It is access control, applied identically to everyone. The pages that are not gated are the ones that carry no catalog: shipping, returns, research use only, contact, order tracking, the affiliate program, and this blog.

Most research suppliers ask visitors to tick "I agree" on an attestation and then show the catalog. We used to as well. An anonymous click that sets a cookie is a weak record: it says that somebody, at some point, ticked a box. Registration is stronger. The research attestation — that material is being acquired for legitimate laboratory research and will not be administered to any human or animal — is now something a named researcher agrees to when they create the account, on a record that identifies them. It is a materially better answer to the question "who did you sell this to, and what did they tell you?"

An account is created at sign in with an email address and a password, and the research attestation is agreed to as part of creating it. Once signed in, the catalog is visible and orders can be placed. The same account is the one the order confirmation and tracking emails go to, and the email address on it is the one that looks up an order on the track page — see tracking your order.

The terms are set out on the research use only page and summarised here so nobody is surprised:

• Material is acquired for legitimate in-vitro laboratory research.
• It will not be administered to any human or animal.
• The purchaser is responsible for handling, storage and disposal, and for complying with the law where they are.
• We may refuse, limit or cancel any order where we cannot reasonably satisfy ourselves that the purchaser is a qualified researcher.

These are the same conditions every purchaser accepts. Registration simply attaches a name to the acceptance.

A carrier's compliance reviewer, a payment underwriter reading the legal stack, a customer looking up a policy after checkout, an affiliate checking the program terms — each needs to read certain pages without an account, and none of those pages shows a product. So the legal, shipping, support and educational pages stay open and the catalog stays behind the gate. The line is "no product names, no prices, no catalog," and every ungated page meets it.

The account is not only a gate. It is the identity the order is placed under, the email address confirmations and tracking go to, and the record that ties the research attestation to the purchase. Signing in before ordering means the checkout already knows who is buying. An order placed under the account can be looked up on the track page with the order number and that email. Support questions about an order are answered faster when the message comes from the registered address, because the account is how the order is found. And the research attestation agreed at registration is the one every subsequent order is made under — there is no separate checkbox at checkout because the record already exists. The terms that govern the account and every purchase under it are published in full.

If a password reset does not arrive, check the spam folder and confirm the address is the one registered. If an account cannot be found, it may have been registered under a different email. For anything else, contact support with the email address you registered with; we reply within one business day.