Online shopping has definitely become the most convenient way to shop. You can sit in the office or at home and do your shopping and have your goods delivered to your door. Although this great service exists and a lot of businesses implement online shopping functionality, a lot of people don’t use it. This is because they are too scared or not comfortable with the fact that they need to submit their card details on a website.

You definitely need to be careful when using your card details online but you can determine when a website is unsafe or when you should be cautious. If a company wants to sell products online they need a couple of things on their website to get trust from their visitors so that they know their details will be safe.  To do this they need a refund policy, terms and conditions and a SSL certificate in place to gain trust with clients and to show that it is a real company not just a scam.

The SSL certificate is the important part, that is where your details and transactions are kept private even though they travel across the internet. How it works is the SSL certificate is a piece of code that enables an encrypted connection between a clients computer and your site. You will see the following in your address bar, the URL will change from http to https and there will be an image of a lock at the end of your URL .If you click on the lock it will give you the details of the merchant who the certificate belongs to. If you use Firefox before the http part of the URL you will see the name of the merchant, you can also click on it to see more details. If you don’t see any of the above, it is not safe to enter your credit card details on the page at all and you should look at different payment methods.

The rest of the posts this week will all involve online shopping so do check in again for some more tips on online shopping.