Since today, the Monday after the Thanksgiving Holiday, is supposed to be one of the biggest e-commerce shopping days of the year, The UnSponsored Link gives you an early Christmas present in the form of timeless online shopping tips:
1. Take a look at the Consumer Reports WebWatch guidelines for credible Web sites. These function not only as guidelines for Web publishers to help them build better sites, but as a consumer "bill of rights" stating the minimum a consumer should expect from any Web site.
2. Take a look to the left hand side of this blog's home page. You'll find lists of good sites and possibly not-so-good sites. Don't go shopping on the not-so-good sites.
3. Don't buy laptops site unseen from sellers in Romania.
4. Once you've found a site you like, make sure the really important pages where you enter your personal stuff are secure pages (the URL starts with https, the "s" for secure). Look for a padlock icon in your browser, at the top of the window, or at the bottom. Some browsers do better putting the padlock next to the URL of the site you're on, and then color-coding the URL after matching the site's information with a registry or digital certificate.
5. If you're using a shopping "bot" or shopping "tool" or big aggregator site like Amazon.com, make sure to familiarize yourself with the policies of the merchant you are working with. Check what protections the host site gives you.
6. Make sure your favorite shopping tool or bot has a facility that allows you to organize information by price, so you're looking at a list of the best prices of the thing you want to buy, not a list ordered by which merchant paid how much money to be there.
7. Look at user feedback ratings. Don't buy anything from a merchant with fewer than...how many feedbacks? 100? 1,000? Depends on your risk tolerance. It's a pretty big job to generate 1,000 false feedbacks. The point is, be careful of "new merchants" unless they have some sort of certification from the shopping tool site, or the shopping tool site offers protections. And contribute to the process! If you have a good experience, leave a good feedback. If you had a bad experience, state just the facts, in order to warn other consumers. (If you get vindictive and nasty in your feedback, you may find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit).
8. Don't forget the shipping charges! A lot of merchants leave them out of their "total price," making it look like you are getting a better deal. As you're making the purchase you find out the shipping charges bring the price up to what everyone else is charging.
9. If you're really nervous about the whole thing, shop the online stores of real-world brands you already trust. They're not going to endanger their offline reputation.
10. Figure out how much privacy you care about, and fill out information on the site accordingly. Know that the site you are shopping will capture as much information about you as possible for its own purposes, so it can send you targeted e-mails and such. Some people like that stuff. But make sure you opt out if the site's privacy policy says it will share your data with other people. In the offline world, is your mailbox jammed with more and more catalogs every year? If the answer is yes, it's because...you've probably bought stuff from catalogs! So the merchants sell your shopping behavior information to other merchants, who in turn send you catalogs for "like-minded" people.