With the tremendous growth of
ecommerce platforms over the last decade, customers today have the option of
making all their purchases from the comforts of their own home. These online
stores also provide substantial discounts on a wide range of products which
makes it more economical to buy them through the internet than traditional
brick and mortar stores. The fact that the products are delivered at your
doorstep is one of the biggest advantages of online shopping. However,
consumers also need to be wary of online shopping fraud. There have been rising
number of cyber crimes related to online shopping fraud and it always pays to be
cautious. Here are some easy tips you can follow to avoid being a victim of
online shopping fraud.
- Pick Your Sellers with Care
With e-commerce sites, you will
find thousands of sellers selling a wide range of items. While the e-commerce
company will go to great lengths to weed out dubious dealers, it can never be
fool proof method and scammers will always find a way to make things work to
their advantage. So to avoid online shopping fraud from ever happening to you,it is essential to pick sellers who have a good reputation on the site. These sellers
have typically been around for many years and have generated great reviews from
former customers for consistently providing excellent service. You should be
looking to make purchases from such kind of sellers. On the other hand, you
need to be extra cautious while dealing with people who are registered new and
have very little selling experience on the site.
- Top Reviewed Shopping Sites
With ecommerce platforms becoming
really popular, hundreds of similar sites are being developed every year and not
all of them provide customers with a safe shopping experience. Some of these
sites might be selling poor quality products or fake items. For example, you
might pay money online to buy a nice looking pair of NIKE shoes but the seller
might be fake and might be delivering goods that are not original. However the
price would be same as what you would originally pay for a branded pair of
shoes. So firstly, to avoid on online shopping fraud, you need to pick
ecommerce platforms that are known to sell original stuff. If it the store is
going to sell generic items, it should let the customers know about it in
advance.
The other thing that is
importance is to ensure that the site is well encrypted. With many small
ecommerce sites mushrooming all across the world, they might not necessarily
invest in the best encryption processes to keep servers well protected. This
could leave you severely vulnerable to online shopping fraud.
There are a number of hackers who
make a living trying to hack into small shopping sites because they have lower
standards of encryption. Once they are in, they look to acquire the credit card
data of customers who made purchases on the site. This they later to sell to
the highest bidder on the black market.
The biggest flip side to all this is that you might be in the dark about
this when the attack happens and will realize the incident only when you get
your monthly statement with your
shopping bill running to thousands of dollars until your credit card gets
maxed out. To avoid this kind of online
shopping fraud, you need to make sure that you do business only on sites where
there is high levels of encryption. You can easily compile a list of such sites
by doing a simple Google search.
