Shopping safely online With Sean's "5 Point Inspection Plan"

Shopping safely and securely online, should be your #1 concern this upcoming holiday season. With the recent boom in Internet merchants there is no shortage of competition, so pricing shouldn't be an issue. The questions that need to be asked are. Are their first concerns your safety and quality of service? Or Their profits? With Sean's 5 point inspection plan you will know what to look for in a quality merchant BEFORE having any of your sensitive information compromised.

#1 The easiest and best way to check out a website is to call them... Any legitimate business will have a phone number, an address and posted office hours. Don't buy into that line of BS about them saving you money by cutting out the phone bill. That's stupid, the true reason is that they don't have a business line because they aren't a real business.

#2 Website encryption is getting cheaper and cheaper every year and any website that is performing any kind of service online should be transmitting any sensitive data through a secure connection aka Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Go ahead and type an “s” following “http" in the websites address, making it look like "https://thewebdomain.com”. This will change your connection to the website to a secure encrypted connection. If you get a warning about the certificate not matching the website that is normally a sign that the company was to cheap to get a SSL certificate ensuring your sensitive data is encrypted upon transmission. Worse, is if it transfers you back to "http", that means that website has taken no steps to encrypt anything and you should leave that site asap.

#3 A lot of business's get complaints and no one has 100% of their customers, 100% happy, but you can tell a lot about a company by how they handled their complaints. Do a search on consumer advocacy websites like, ripoffreport.com and see if they have any complaints and how they responded. Did they just ignore them? Did they're representative lose his cool and insult the consumer? Or Were they genuinely empathetic and helpful? Business's can't make everyone 100% happy but they can certainly give 100% effort and try and resolve the issue.

#4 Certifications, the good the bad and the ugly. Okay this subject is quite tricky and I will try and tread lightly :). 98% of them are 100% useless, they were designed to give you "the consumer" a false sense of safety, so you stop inspecting the website. Most of them are down right fake and quite frankly as useful as a "poopie flavored lollipop". The other 2% are actually legitimate but are also expensive and really, they still only point out the obvious. I'll post a list in my next article separating the cream from the crap.

#5 Actually read the privacy policy and TOS. Personally, I do not want my private data sold to another company. I don't need more Spam mail in my inbox or telemarketers calling my home. So, save yourself some hassle and read their policies.

Have a fun and safe holiday season and don't forget to save a lot of money and shop safely online :)

About The Author-- Sean Estabrook - Business Relations Dept. Ebtown.com

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