Shopping online has become more and more popular, which is phenomenal for the consumer – it’s made it painless to shop. Also, the increase in competition unified with low running costs has determined cheap prices for items.

Nevertheless, as the online market has grown, so too has the need to be conscious of your consumer rights, and what to do if you find yourself with faulty items or goods that don’t even turn up. Data is available on the internet, like the consumer protection act 1987.

You also need to be aware of what payment provider to use to buy something, as each payment provider has its own terms. To take an example, Paypal act as an independent arbiter only for physical goods, not digital downloads. Understanding this kind of information is the difference between getting your money back or being ripped of by an 419 fraud.

Our word of advice is to do your research about the seller : do they display their phone number and postal address? What is the seller’s terms and conditions? Their returns policy? Their privacy policy? All these queries need to be resolved before you consider buying from the seller.

Another issue to consider: what are the methods of purchase? Nowadays, it’s not enough to merely look for “the padlock” (SSL certificate) – this won’t tell you how they store your information, only how it’s transmitted when you make the order. If you have doubts, only buy from vendors who use 3rd party payment gateways such as PayPal, Google Checkout, WorldPay, SagePay and NoChex.You can also verify the reputation the seller has with his payment gateway, e.g. check his PayPal account and how many orders have occurred on this particular account.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Consumer Issues, Internet Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.