Product reviews and recommendations on Mumsnet
Our mission is simple: to make parents’ lives easier. We know that life as a parent often means time and money are scarce. That’s why we create in-depth and unbiased buyer’s guides and product reviews so that you can confidently make the right choices for you and your family.
Whether you’re looking for a buggy or baby monitor, a vacuum cleaner or steam iron, Mumsnet does the hard work for you. Our comprehensive, no-nonsense buyer’s guides merge valuable parent feedback from our forums with meticulous research and rigorous real-life testing to bring you expert and unbiased advice on the products we think are really worth investing in.
Transparency is really important to us and that's why we're always upfront about how we choose the products we recommend. We write about products that we feel offer the best value to most parents – the ones we'd recommend to our own friends and family.
We update our articles regularly to make sure the products that we feature are up to date and prices are correct.
Can brands pay to be featured in our buyer's guides?
No, brands can’t pay to be featured in our buyer’s guides - these are impartial. Product samples are sent to our testers and reviewers, but there is no incentive for us to feature the products we test on our site if they don’t perform well.
We sometimes use affiliate marketing links, which means that when you buy a product through a link on our site, we may earn a commission. We are part of the Amazon Associates programme and may earn from qualifying purchases, along with other commission-based partnerships.
Any revenue generated through affiliate links on Mumsnet allows us to continue creating helpful and trustworthy content that we know will resonate with our readers.
Why you should trust our recommendations
All of our buyer’s guides and product reviews are unbiased and created independently by our team of trusted journalists and writers, who have expertise in the product categories they write about. Our editorial team loves delving into the data, following consumer trends and finding the newest products to hit the market.
As a team, we spend hours scouring the Mumsnet forums for honest and authentic product recommendations from parents. We then turn to online bestseller lists and trusted retailers to collate reliable consumer feedback. Once we understand what parents are saying, we consult the experts and do our own in-depth testing to really put the products through their paces.
1. Collect unbiased recommendations from parents
To ensure we find the products that will truly meet your needs, we always consult our trusted Mumsnet users for honest recommendations. With 8 million unique users visiting our forums each month, we know just how important and valuable the opinion of our Mumsnet users is in helping us to identify the products that families love, and that fare well in both day-to-day life and in the long term.
2. Consult the experts
When compiling our list of recommendations, our experienced journalists spend hours researching each product category, speaking with experts for impartial guidance on what to look out for, and collating up-to-date lab test results from trusted expert review sites, such as Which?, to evaluate which products are best in class right now.
3. Collate consumer feedback
We know that the real experts are you, the consumer, so we make sure to check online reviews on retail sites, such as Mamas & Papas, Boots, Argos and Amazon, to make sure the products we recommend are up to task and rated highly by the people who use them. We look for both positive and negative feedback, considering the quality, safety, features, ease of use and value for money of each product to ensure it performs well across the board.
4. In-depth testing
Finally, we test as many products ourselves as we can, putting them through their paces with our dedicated team of testers to discover true quality and performance, only recommending products that perform to the high standards we set in testing.
How we test and review products: five-star scoring system
We choose to test our products in real-world settings over labs so that you get a complete picture of how they perform in day-to-day life.
During our in-depth testing process, we produce detailed test notes and score each product out of 100, with individual scores given in up to eight key interest categories, such as performance, quality, ease of use, value for money and, where relevant, safety. Once tests are complete, we analyse the results and write a detailed review. Only the best-performing products that we believe are worth your consideration are then featured in our buyer's guides.
The amount of time we spend researching and testing depends on the individual product category, but we aim to test each product for a minimum of two weeks, with many products tested for longer.