|
Online shopping has some risks associated with it. There are some shady
dealers out there who will take advantage of you. See the section on
digital cameras for an example.
To protect yourself from bad experiences, here are a few tips:
Find out the true price
Oftentimes retailers will try to sell an item at a lower price but then
recover the money by inflating shipping and/or handling charges. I've seen
stores add a $200 shipping charge to a laptop. The goal is to appear at the top
of price search engines. Most of these search engines now give you an option to
add your zip code to get a true estimate of the total cost, but there are still
some out there that don't.
Research the store
If you're not dealing with a well-known retailer such as Dell, Amazon.com or
Buy.com, for example, refer to the following sites for more information. You
will most certainly find a pattern in companies' business practices.
Use a credit card that will protect you
- Most credit cards limit your liability in case of fraud
- Some credit card companies allow you to generate one-time-use numbers
to give you more peace of mind
- Credit card companies will allow to do a chargeback if the retailer
does not cooperate with you
- If possible, use a credit card that will double your warranty
(usually platinum level or gold level cards include such protection); most
will double the warranty up to a year, so if you buy a product that comes
with a six month warranty, the card company will cover an additional six
months, if you purchase a product with a two year warranty, the company will
cover an additional year
Use secure sites
Whenever you enter personal information, and especially payment data,
be sure that the URL in your browser's address bar starts with https
(s=secure). This ensures that the data is encrypted as it is transferred
to the vendor's site. However, be warned... using secure sites alone
does not protect your data. In recent history, when credit card data was
stolen, it was not intercepted as people transmitted it via the
Internet. Rather, hackers broke into retailers' databases and downloaded
numbers by the thousands.
|
|
