It can be hard to remember what it was like before online shopping took the retail industry by storm and transformed the way that people buy goods forever. According to research, 75% of Americans have shopped online, and it’s easy to see why when it is such a convenient option with so much choice readily available for you to browse from your own home. Nowadays, you can buy pretty much anything and everything online from groceries to cars; you can even buy weed online.
While online shopping is super convenient, it is also essential to be aware of the dangers of internet shopping and take steps to keep your details safe and secure. Cybercriminals are continually coming up with new ways to get us to part with our personal information and cash, so being savvy when shopping is so important.
Here are some ways to help keep you safer when online shopping.
Passwords
There’s nothing more irritating than forgetting a password, which makes it all the more tempting to stick with the same password for absolutely everything. While using just one password may make it easier to remember it when you need it if your password is compromised, everywhere that you use that same password is compromised too.
WiFi
While WiFi is an incredibly useful thing, it can also leave you vulnerable to hackers too. Using public WiFi connections when you’re at the coffee shop or in a store is tempting, but it can leave you vulnerable, especially if you are doing some online shopping.
Lock
A simple way to see if the online retailers you are buying from are secure is by checking the address line. Any site that you are purchasing from should start with HTTPS rather than simply HTTP, you should also be able to see a padlock in the address bar too. Having https and a padlock shows that the site has secure sockets layer encryption.
Feeling
Some websites can give you a bad feeling about them from the get-go, if you visit a site that you don’t like the look of, trust your instincts and don’t make a purchase. You may be wrong, it may be entirely reputable, but you don’t want to find out the hard way that it is not.
Check
You may have been happily shopping away without anything sending alarm bells ringing about a security breach, and then the post arrives, you open your bank statement and get a shock. Even if you don’t think that anything untoward has occurred while you were shopping online, it is still essential to check your bank and credit card statements so that you can check through for any irregularities.
Credit
Never use your debit card when shopping online, as this could leave you open to trouble. Using your credit card when you buy, means that you have a better level of protection if something goes wrong with the transaction, such as your item is never delivered to you despite your payment still being taken.
