Identity, and why a certificate is not verification
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Common names are not unique
The same common name covers different species in different places, and related species differ in constituents and sometimes in safety. Buying by common name is buying something adjacent to what you meant. Specifying the botanical name, genus and species, is the baseline.
Part used matters as much as species
Root, leaf, aerial parts and seed are not interchangeable and a product made from the wrong part is a different product. A specification names the species and the part, not just the plant.
Substitution is a real market problem
Cheaper material substituted for expensive, adulterated extracts, and mislabeled lots exist in this supply chain. That is the documented reason the identity requirement is written as it is rather than left to supplier assurance.
A certificate of analysis is a starting point
It tells you what the supplier says. It is not your verification, and the obligation to establish identity is on the manufacturer. For a small maker that usually means a relationship with a lab, which is a cost to plan for rather than discover.
Record the lot through to the bottle
Supplier, their lot, your verification, the batch it went into, the bottles that batch produced. That chain is what lets a problem upstream be traced downstream, and it is the same discipline every property in this library ends up at.
Change of supplier is a change of product
A new source for the same nominal ingredient is new material requiring the same verification, and it can shift the finished product noticeably. Treating it as a purchasing decision rather than a formulation one is how consistency quietly goes.
Keep a retained sample of the raw material, not just the product
If a finished batch is ever questioned, the ingredient lot it came from is the thing you want to be able to retest. Holding a small sample of incoming material costs almost nothing and closes the loop the batch record opens.