How to Verify a Software Reseller Before You Buy: a 12-Point Check

You can verify a software reseller in about ten minutes using only the pages it already publishes. Open four of them: the refund policy, the terms, the contact page and one product listing. Then run the twelve checks below, each one a thing you can see rather than a feeling you form. A missing answer is itself the finding: every gap tells you something specific about who carries the risk after you pay.

Why a grid beats a list of trusted sites

Most articles on this subject hand you a list of names. A list cannot cover the seller you are actually looking at, and gives you no way to tell whether the recommendation was earned or sold. A page built on names also drifts from its own subject: on our own site, an older roundup recommending third-party vendors now draws almost all of its search impressions for those vendors’ brand names rather than for anything about checking a seller.

A grid is portable: it works on a storefront nobody has reviewed yet, on a marketplace listing, and on us. That last point is the test of whether a grid is honest, so we wrote this one to be turned against our own pages and we name the rows we fail.

The twelve-point verification grid

Each row is observable on the seller’s own site. The third column is the part people skip: an absent answer is not neutral, it tells you where the risk has moved.

Three checks that need explaining

Check 5: the reportability test

Microsoft’s counterfeit reporting form asks the buyer for the seller’s name and company name, its email address and website, its complete street address with city, state, postal code and country, and its telephone number. A storefront that does not publish those cannot be reported at all. The question is not “does this look professional” but “could you name, locate and call this company tomorrow”.

Check 7: the dropdown trap

On a listing with a dropdown of editions, one specification block often describes only one of them, so where a one-time edition and an annual edition share a dropdown the card can be right for the default and wrong for the rest. A good card says which edition it describes and how the others differ. Select the edition you intend to buy, then re-read the card before paying.

Check 10: why the widget is not the rating

Open the review platform at its own address rather than the widget embedded on the store. The embedded version is chosen by the seller; the profile is not. Read the one-star reviews first and check whether the company replies in public: that previews your own dispute.

Run the grid against us

Here is the same grid applied to this website, with the page to open and what it says, so you can confirm each line yourself. Two rows fail, one is partial and one we did not verify, and they are marked as such.

To check those rows, open our refund and returns policy, our terms and conditions, our contact page and any listing.

Three of our own product cards, side by side

The specification blocks on three live listings, read on 9 October 2026.

Check 7 becomes concrete here. The third listing sells four editions from one dropdown, and three differ from the default on term, platform or device count. Its card names the default edition outright and summarises the others, which is what a variable listing has to do for its specification block to mean anything.

Where we do not pass our own grid

Publishing a grid and quietly exempting ourselves would make it worthless, so here are the rows we fail.

Our third-party profile is not ours to curate

This is the one to run against us rather than read about. Our profile is open on Trustpilot, at an address we do not host, and we choose neither which reviews appear there nor how they are averaged. The reviews shown on our own pages are verified purchases collected after delivery, which measures something narrower by design. Where the two disagree, check 10 says to weight the one the seller does not control, and that rule applies to us exactly as it applies to anyone else.

Our about-us page contradicts our Microsoft status

We are a Microsoft partner and an authorised Microsoft reseller. We hold no equivalent authorisation from Adobe, Autodesk, Corel, Nitro, Foxit, MAGIX, Kaspersky, ESET or Ashampoo, and are an independent software reseller of those products. The problem is that our about-us page says we are “not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe or any other software publisher”, with no exception, while our terms and our machine-readable site summary both carry an “unless explicitly stated” clause that leaves room for the Microsoft relationship. A reader applying check 6 to us will land on that contradiction, so we would rather name it than be caught by it. The about-us wording is what needs correcting, not the Microsoft status.

One product card is weaker than the grid demands

On the Office 2021 single-PC listing the device row is missing from the specification block, and the device count survives only in the body text, which reads that the licence is valid for 1 PC. That is what check 8 exists to catch, and a reader running the grid should mark us down for it.

The Acrobat listing sits beside it as the counter-example. One set of specification rows could easily have been wrong for three of its four editions; instead the card names the default edition and its terms, then summarises how the others differ. When you hit a dropdown, that is the treatment to look for.

What the publishers say about buying outside their channels

A grid that only looks at sellers is incomplete. Microsoft maintains a consumer resource called How To Tell, whose stated purpose is to “Learn, verify and buy with confidence”. Its shopping section gives two rules worth carrying: “Make sure you are buying from a reseller you trust”, and that “if the price looks too good to be true, it probably is”, with the refinement that counterfeit software is often advertised “at just below the normal retail price so you think you’re simply getting a good deal”.

The route Microsoft itself describes as the lowest risk is buying from Microsoft, or a machine with the software preinstalled. If you want the lowest risk rather than the lowest price, that is the honest recommendation, and no checklist changes it. What the grid below does is narrow the gap for everything else: it tells you which sellers publish the terms they can be held to, and which ask you to guess.

Microsoft’s licensing page adds a point that catches business buyers: “Windows volume licenses are for upgrades only and require a qualifying full operating system to be installed on the PC as a pre-requisite.” A volume licence sold as a complete operating system for a bare machine is a mismatch however the key behaves. And if you believe you were sold counterfeit software, Microsoft runs a counterfeit reporting form, the same form whose required fields make up check 5.

A ten-minute order of operations

A seller clearing all five stages is not proven trustworthy. It is proven to have made written commitments you could hold it to, which is the most a ten-minute check can give you.

Frequently asked questions

Products in this article

Adobe Acrobat Pro License (Win and Mac)

80.00 $ – 216.00 $Price range: 80.00 $ through 216.00 $

View Adobe Acrobat Pro License (Win and Mac)

Microsoft Office 2021 - One-time Purchase

39.00 $ – 60.00 $Price range: 39.00 $ through 60.00 $

View Microsoft Office 2021 - One-time Purchase

Digital delivery by email · Secure payment by card, Apple Pay and Google Pay