Disclaimer
ShelfStamp searches federal recall records. It does not inspect products, and it cannot tell you whether an item is fit for a child to use. This page explains — in plain English, without hedging — exactly what you are getting and exactly what you are not.
1. The one sentence we will never say
ShelfStamp will never tell you that a product is fine, cleared, approved, or fit for a child to use. It cannot know that. Nobody who has not physically examined the object can know that.
Every other screening service in this category eventually reaches for a reassuring tick in a reassuring colour. We do not have one. The palette this product is built from does not contain the colour of reassurance at all — deliberately, and enforced by a lint rule that fails the build if anyone ever adds it.
An absence of findings is an absence of colour, because an absence of findings is not good news. It is the absence of news.
2. What a screening actually is
You give us a brand and a model number — typed, or read by a machine from a photograph of the tracking label. We search the recall records published by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We tell you whether we found a match.
That is all of it. It is a database search. It is a good one, and it is still a database search.
3. What NO MATCH FOUND means — and what it does not
NO MATCH FOUND means: we searched, and we did not find a matching recall.
It is a statement about our search. It is not a statement about your crib. The two are not the same thing and the distance between them is where a child could be hurt.
Here is everything NO MATCH FOUND is compatible with:
- The item is badly damaged. A cracked frame, a corroded bolt, a missing crossbar. No database records the condition of your particular object, and we never saw it.
- The car seat has been in a crash. Which makes it unusable, and which is invisible to every recall database in the world.
- The item is counterfeit. It carries a label that matches a real product, and it is not that product. The label is the only thing we can read, and a fake label reads exactly like a real one.
- The defect is real but has not been recalled yet. Recalls lag the harm that causes them. Often by years. The recall that will be issued next month describes a product that is dangerous today, and today we will tell you we found nothing.
- The defect will never be recalled. Not every dangerous product is recalled. The manufacturer may be gone, the product may be too old, the agency may never have been told.
- The recall exists but we could not match it. Recall notices are prose, written by humans, and many of them never state a model number at all. We extract what we can. We cannot extract what is not there.
- The recall is not federal. We search CPSC and NHTSA. Not state agencies, not foreign regulators, not manufacturer notices that were never published as a recall.
- You typed it wrong, or we read it wrong. One character off, and we searched for a different product and truthfully told you we found nothing.
If any of those is the situation you are in, a ShelfStamp screening will say NO MATCH FOUND, and it will be right, and it will be useless to you.
4. Then what is it good for?
It is good for exactly one thing, and the thing is worth doing: there are roughly thirteen thousand recall records covering children’s products, they are published in a form nobody can use while standing in a consignment line, and a recalled crib that is on that list will be caught. Every year, children are injured by products that were recalled years earlier and resold by someone who simply did not know.
Finding those is real. It is not nothing. But it is a floor, not a ceiling, and the whole point of this page is that you should not mistake the floor for the ceiling.
5. What a certificate proves
A certificate proves that a screening happened — on a stated date, against stated databases, of stated freshness, producing a stated result, bound to a specific photograph of a specific label. It is signed, and the signature makes all of that tamper-evident.
It is a record of an event. It is not a warranty, an inspection report, a safety certification, or an opinion about the object.
If you are a buyer, and a seller shows you a ShelfStamp certificate: it tells you they screened the item and what came back. It does not tell you the item is in good condition, that it has not been damaged, that it is genuine, or that it is the same item in the photograph.
Inspect the item. The certificate is not a substitute for looking at what you are buying.
6. If you run a childcare program
Our state pages summarise publicly available licensing rules and cite them to primary sources. We read all fifty states and the District of Columbia, and where a state has no recall-monitoring requirement, we say so — even though saying so means you have less reason to pay us.
Those summaries are not legal advice. Rules change, we can be wrong, and your licence is yours. Verify against your own licensing authority.
Any record we assemble for you is a convenience document produced from your own screening history. It is not a state form, no licensing authority issued or approved it, and filing it does not discharge an obligation. Where a record carries a signature line, the signature is yours and it attests to your inspection — we assembled the paperwork, we did not inspect anything, and we cannot sign for you.
7. We are not the government
ShelfStamp is an independent service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting under the authority of the CPSC, NHTSA, the FDA, or any state licensing agency. We use their published data, we cite it, and we link to the original record every time — so that you can check us.
8. What to do instead of trusting us
Read this as the instruction it is. If you are about to put a child in a secondhand product:
- Screen it here. It takes fifteen seconds and it is free.
- Then look at the actual object. Every joint, every strap, every bolt. A screening cannot do this and neither can a photograph.
- Check the item against the manufacturer’s own site and CPSC.gov/Recalls yourself. The data is public. We are a convenience over it, not a replacement for it.
- For a car seat, assume it has been in a crash unless you know its history from someone you trust. No database will ever tell you this.
- If anything about it worries you, do not use it. A crib costs less than the alternative.
9. Tell us when we are wrong
If a screening returned the wrong answer — if we missed a recall that was there, or flagged one that was not — we want to know, immediately, and we will fix it and say publicly that we did.
Write to support@shelfstamp.com. A false clearance is the most serious defect this service can have, and it gets treated that way.
The full agreement is in the Terms of Service. Where this page and the Terms differ, the Terms control — but they say the same thing, and they were written to.