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Wednesday, 2 November 2011

The Dangers Of Online Shopping

By Owen Jones


There are billions more dollars spent on line every year than the year before. This shows that more and more people are feeling more comfortable with on line shopping. However, there are still quite a number of individuals who are worried about using their credit cards over the Internet. In fact, there have always been risks to on line shopping, but many of them have already been remedied.

Despite the increase in on line security, the increased security of web sites and the acceptance by banks of some of the responsibility for on line credit card shopping, there are still a couple of risks, which the rest of this piece will take a look at. It is a proper thing to bring these risks out into the open in order to put shoppers' minds at peace.

One of the biggest risks is identity theft. Identity theft is the collecting of a person's financial and personal details with the object of using them dishonestly. In fact, the least probable consequence of identity theft is huge financial loss, if any at all, because the banks by and large guarantee that they will refund any money stolen from credit cards on line.

However, the banks do not offer the same guarantee to the seller, so the retail outlet might lose a great deal of money due to cash backs and they might put your name and address on a blacklist.

It could take you months to get off the blacklist and during that time, your credit status might be affected. In fact, this could be a hard problem to overcome in the short term.

One manner to help make sure that your personal details do not get stolen is to check the degree of security of the web site you are dealing with. Any web page taking personal details should be encrypted, but any page handling financial details ought to begin with https rather than http. The extra 's' stands for security which means that there will be an extra layer of encryption on that page.

One of the other main factors of concern is returns. People are worried about what will happen if their items are faulty or are damaged in the post. This is a prime area of concern and you ought to never buy anything from a company that does not make it clear how they deal with returns (and complaints in general).

If you are still uncertain about the company, you could type "issues about firm name" into Google. This may give you a more accurate idea of the firm's reaction to returns and issues than the firm's own trumpet-blowing. One tip here: check the quality of the issues: ten of them might be from one complainant regarding one issue.

Under roughly the same heading as the above problem is misleading product descriptions. This would really come under customer complaints and so customer service, but people do think it a different difficulty nevertheless.




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