How Salaaz works
Most ethical-commerce sites tell you a product is “sustainable” and stop there. Salaaz tells you what was verified, what wasn’t, and what the vendor still owes the platform in disclosures. The result is slower, and the numbers are real.
Search and filters work on disclosed attributes: country of origin, certifications a vendor actually holds, the supply-chain stages they’ve disclosed. No paid placement, no “sponsored” tiles. Ranking is the platform’s impact score, which vendors can’t buy.
Every product page surfaces an ethics score out of 5, broken down by four pillars and traceable to the individual stages Salaaz verified. Where a stage isn’t disclosed, the page says so.
Lists are the long-form curation space, collections you build over weeks and can share or fork. The cart is the short-form thinking space for the items you’re considering buying now. No countdowns, no “Only 3 left” flashes. We built the platform for considered purchases.
Square handles payment processing, and Salaaz never sees your card. Shipping is calculated against the vendor’s actual workshop or warehouse address, so the carbon footprint shown is the measured one rather than a marketing estimate.
Reviews are split between quality (stars) and ethics (a separate count) so a product with great fit but thin disclosure can’t hide behind its star rating. If something we wrote about a vendor turns out to be wrong, tell us. We publish corrections on the editorial.
The same checks apply at every stage, and nothing is grandfathered in. A vendor who passes signup doesn’t earn a permanent free pass. Every new listing and every variant edit re-runs the disclosure review.
Stage 1
Signup
Business registration, named ownership, supplier list, the workshops or fields they source from.
Stage 2
Listing
Per-product disclosure: materials, fabrication, ethical claims with evidence, backed by invoices, certifications, workshop photos.
Stage 3
Variant change
Every new size, colour, or material is re-vetted. New suppliers go back through the signup-grade checks.
Each product’s ethics score out of 5 is the weighted sum of four pillars. The visual below shows a sample breakdown, a real product page paints these bars with the vendor’s actual disclosed and verified numbers.
Materials
4.3/5
Origin, processing method, certifications.
Labor
3.9/5
Worker rights, wages, conditions, community impact.
Supply chain
3.6/5
Disclosure depth across the stages from raw material to delivery.
Environmental
4.1/5
Materials lifecycle, packaging, shipping footprint.
Weighted total
4.0/5
People sometimes ask why a product has both an ethics score and a separate impact score on the vendor profile. They measure different things, so we keep them apart.
Ethics score · public
The number on the product page, out of 5. Reflects what’s been disclosed and verified across that product’s supply chain: invoices seen, certifications confirmed, workshop photos checked. A high score means the platform stands behind those claims; a missing stage drops the score accordingly.
Where you see it: product page, list ethics aggregate, cart weighted average.
Impact score · internal
Vendor-level signal we use to rank search results. It combines disclosure depth, platform history, return rate, dispute resolution time. Vendors can’t buy this. No paid placement exists. The reason it’s internal: surfacing it would create gameable behaviour, and the buying signal belongs to ethics, not internal logistics.
Where you see it: nowhere directly. It only shapes ranking position.
We split the two scores because conflating them is exactly how greenwashing usually survives. A great operational record gets quietly used to imply ethics that weren’t actually verified.
The shortest description of Salaaz is the list of things the platform refuses to do. They’re all small individually; together they describe the brand.
