About seven years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, many people
regarded internet shopping as a taboo, something unheard of, with one of the
main reasons being a lack of trust placed in the payment system. How do we
know our details will be safe, is an example of one of the many questions
asked. Yet in today's fast paced world that taboo has turned into a
revolution. With thousands of online stores, people are using internet
shopping more and more these days. From electronic and specialist goods,
right down to basic grocery shopping, you could survive in this life without
ever having to leave your front door for any forms of purchases. So if you
are still in the dark about how it all works and how to get started, this
article will hopefully enlighten you and turn you into a committed online
shopper.
Yet before I show you some of the best places to order online,
you may still have your doubts at how safe your credit card details are, so
to begin with it might be best to explain how your details are protected and
how to maximise your safety.
When it comes to online shopping, you will always have what is known as a
basket to place your goods in. Once you have chosen everything you want, you
go to the checkout service. Like any old store, this is where you hand over
the money, although instead of a person doing it, it's a computer. All
online shopping websites will have a secure payment system, with all sorts
of protection coded into their sites to enable maximum security against
hackers (in fact in most cases of fraud on the internet, attackers use
viruses on your computer to steal details meaning the site has nothing to do
with it at all). All you have to do is enter your credit card details and
their computer will do the rest. Sounds a bit scary at first, as how do you
know they won't keep your details? Well, there are steps you can take to
ensure you are on a trusted site, with their payment system approved by a
respectable third party.
For starters, when you go to the checkout screen, it is always useful to
look at the address bar where it would normally say http://shoppingsite.com.
If you are on a secure checkout page (and if you are not, do not use it!)
instead of having http:// at the start, it should say https://. The s stands
for secure, so make sure its there!
This might seem a little technical to someone not used to computers, so
there are other ways to check whether or not you should shop on certain
sites. For example, if you can not use your credit or debit card on there,
it would be advisable to steer well clear. Credit and debit cards have
insurance and protection plans to repair misuse of your details. If you end
up paying with a bank transfer for instance, and your account is hacked,
that person has got access to your entire bank account instead of say a low
limit credit card where it will be blocked if suspicious usage is found on
it. Even more the damage would be far more severe as not all banks pay back
what you loose.
So now that you are hopefully up to speed on secure internet shopping,
now might be a good time to explain to you exactly where you can go to shop.
Well, firstly it depends on what you want. One of the most internationally
renowned sites is Amazon (www.amazon.com). It is available in multiple
countries with its own site for each one, and sells nearly everything except
clothes and food. For instance, if you are after a mobile phone, it is more
than likely that Amazon will have the one you are looking for, and normally
at a reduced rate, while if you are searching for the new Stephen king book,
its bound to be on there. Because Amazon is so internationally renowned, you
are going to be very safe shopping with them. In fact, you might end up
logging on to Amazon and finding you have bought tons of stuff you would
never have dreamed of buying as they recommend products to you based on the
searches you make on their site.
Yet while Amazon has nearly every popular product, it might be extremely
hard to find certain niche and especially older items. It might be possible
that it does not have what you want in stock either, and this can present
problems. This is where eBay comes into the picture. If you have not heard
of eBay at some point, then you are missing out. EBay is the world's largest
online auction site with millions of users selling stuff every day. If what
you are looking for has been discontinued on certain sites and stores, then
eBay might have what you are after. People sell all sorts of junk on there
which you can bid for, and if bidding for old tat is not your thing, then
you can log onto eBay express which contain new businesses selling brand new
products for fixed prices.
Finally, if for some reason you can not find what you are looking for on
eBay, you can always turn to Google's Froogle. While that phrase may sound
strange, the acclaimed search engine Google has set up a special search
engine called Froogle (http://froogle.google.com/) which search's online
shops for the best prices for the products that you are after. All you do is
enter the product that you want and it will search through thousands of
sites to find you the best prices and gives you the links to them. In fact,
you do not even have to log onto Amazon or eBay as Froogle searches them for
you to.
Hopefully now that you're coming to the end of this article, you've
realised that online shopping is not as a harrowing experience as you might
have through, and you are now prepared to take your first steps into this
cyber world that we seem to inhabit in these modern times.
