Is Buying on the Internet Safe?

You want to shop on the internet at a commercial site, invest in an online service or training, order a product… but how do you know if a site is reliable? How do you know if it is safe enough to buy from or if it might be a scam?

In this article, we list very concrete tips for evaluating the reliability of a website… which can be useful both in your daily life and in your professional life.

1. CHECK THE WEBSITE’S ADDRESS BEFORE BUYING ON THE INTERNET

When you access a site that looks attractive to you and has a name you’ve heard of, consider checking that you’re on the right site. While it is rare to be fooled by this, it is a good reflection because sometimes pirate sites mimic the name of an existing site.

Many techniques exist, here are some examples to show the kind of modification that can occur:

• Changing the domain name extension: Instead of the official Amazon.com URL, the site becomes Amazon.center;
• Using a subdomain: the hacker buys, for example, “zon.br” and creates his project at the address “ama.zon.br”.
• Adding a hyphen to the name: ama-zon.com;
• Add or remove a character: amzon.com.
• Replace one character with another, or use what is called a horoglyph (a character that is very similar to another character): amaz0n.com or amozon.com;
• Duplicate a character: ammazon.com.

Often, out of habit, we barely look at the names of the sites we visit, and if changes are seen quickly on a URL we usually frequent, it is sometimes less obvious on a site we know little about.

2. CHECK FOR CONTACT INFORMATION

To know if a site is trustworthy, an important tip is to check if it offers contact information (email, contact form, phone number, possibility to talk to someone through a chat, etc).

Any serious website offers a means of contact… because it is simply legally required for all legal entities (i.e. companies). Also, on a serious website, this information is usually easy to find.

If you plan to make an important purchase that represents a substantial budget for you, do not hesitate to contact the site to verify that you are being responded to within a reasonable time frame and in an appropriate manner.

3. SEE IF THERE IS A LEGAL NOTICE BEFORE BUYING ON THE INTERNET

Again, legal notice in general is mandatory, and even more crucial in the case of an online sales site. Therefore, it is an important element in assessing its reliability.

The name of the publishing director must be specified, the full details of the company as well (company name, address, phone number), etc.

You will also usually find a privacy policy, terms and conditions of use. A reliable e-commerce site will also have terms and conditions of sale.

These pages sometimes have different names (for instance instead of talking about “privacy policy” we will talk about “personal data management”.

Most Internet users never look at these pages. Simply, when you are looking for how to know if a website is trustworthy, they are among the essential elements.

4. BEFORE BUYING ON THE INTERNET, LOOK AT THE CONTENT OF THE SITE

To know whether a site is reliable or not, it is also interesting to look at the quality of the content of the product. A site with spelling mistakes or low quality visuals is not necessarily dishonest, beware of quick shortcuts. Similarly, a scammer may steal quality content from someone else to try to inspire trust …

However, often a company that is well financially based and somewhat reliable will offer flawless items with decent quality visuals. On the other hand, if the articles are full of errors, that certain sentences look like they were written by a robot, this leads to a certain amount of distrust.

5. CHECK FOR HTTPS

If you want to know whether a website can be trusted for payment, this is a particularly important aspect to check: you must ensure that the URL has the https protocol (the “s” that precisely designates the fact that the access protocol is secure).

When you access a website a lot of information is transferred between you (via your web browser) and the server (the machine that stores the website files). This dialog between browser and server can be done securely, which is especially important if you provide bank details for online purchases, for example.

Browsers inform you of a site using https using a small padlock. In Chrome, for example, you can click on it to check that the certificate authenticating the site is valid.

Warning: again, this is not an absolute sign that there is no risk, but it is an additional indication of trust in the URL.

6. READ GENERAL REVIEWS ABOUT THE COMPANY WHEN BUYING ON THE INTERNET

This is often the method that gives the best results when you wonder how to know if a website is trustworthy or not. Just do a Google search by typing in the name of the site + the term “warning”. You can get a lot of information from this.

Already, see if the company has a poster on Google My Business. If there is, there will be reviews about the company. In these reviews you will look at several things.

Today a company can buy positive reviews… or ask their employees to post positive reviews.

I advise you not to trust a company that has a rating higher than 4/5… but to be wary of a company with a rating lower than 3 or 3.5 out of 5: this means that there is customer dissatisfaction and that even if the company buys positive reviews (or has positive reviews posted by employees), it can’t make up for that dissatisfaction.