Over the last decade, e-commerce has exponentially developed from a niche sector into an industry worth trillions of dollars. Today, people who do not purchase products and services online are the exception to the norm. With substantial transactions involved, ensuring safe online shopping has become increasingly challenging as cybercriminals continuously seek new ways to exploit customers purchasing online. By following certain online shopping safety tips, one can prevent being exploited by cyber threats.
1. Look for Email Scams
Arguably, the most common type of shopping scam is phishing via email. Many customers have lost money or had their data stolen by simply paying too much attention and time to scammy emails. In such fraudulent emails, the sender’s name will masquerade as a well-known e-commerce brand. That tends to draw the attention of unsuspecting email recipients, who end up trusting such emails and their senders.
To trigger the phishing attack, hackers or other cybercriminals who send such emails also include a fraudulent link in the body. Once users click on the link, they land on a page where their delivery address, account information, bank details, and card details are taken without their knowledge. This page, known as a phishing page, looks identical to the landing page of the e-commerce site. Once customers unknowingly feed their data on the phishing page, the cybercriminals trap and steal the data. To avoid such scenarios, customers need to avoid clicking on such links. Instead, they can directly visit the official website or app of the e-commerce company to shop or view any special offers.
2. Stick to Known and Trusted Brands/Vendors
By sticking with well-known brands and vendors, one can ensure that they have a safe online shopping experience. Lesser-known vendors or brands on shopping websites are more likely to be fraudulent and sell fake, malfunctioning products on e-commerce portals. Buying such products can lead to customers losing their money and getting substandard products. Choosing renowned vendors not only ensures that customers get top-quality products and services, but they are also likely to receive top-notch customer service, guarantees/warranties, and other benefits even after they complete their purchases.
Buyers can make sure that they are purchasing goods from renowned brands by visiting the official websites of the manufacturers of the products they wish to purchase.
3. Avoid Public Wi-Fi for Online Shopping
Many people make the mistake of using public Wi-Fi to perform sensitive and critical tasks online using their devices. While such networks are cost-free to use, they are not secure for sending or receiving sensitive personal information. Such networks do not come with adequate safety protocols to safeguard the data of people using it. Online shopping involves giving away personal data and one’s payment information. Hackers can easily access unsuspecting customers’ data and use it for malicious purposes.
To avoid online shopping scams, one should not use web shopping sites or applications through public Wi-Fi networks.
4. Check for the Lock Icon in the URL
There are multiple ways to gauge the level of internet safety for online shopping when it comes to e-commerce sites. One such surefire way to tell whether a shopping site is legitimate is to look at the browser’s address bar. In the bar, users will be able to spot a lock icon at the start of the site’s URL. Sites that are not legitimate do not show this icon. The lock icon indicates that the site comes with SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption installed. This encryption is put in place to secure user data from cyberthreats and further ensures that any transfer of data – names, phone numbers, residential addresses, payment information, or other data – will be protected from hackers, which does not happen on fraudulent websites.
If one cannot spot the lock icon, they should look for the SSL in the site’s URL (https://). The “s” at the end indicates the security of the site. Users can look for this even on non-shopping websites to stay clear of fraudulent ones. Many browsers flag any website or page without the extra S as “not secure,” so a site without it tends to stand out even more in these browsers.
5. Use Unique and Strong Passwords
The scope of internet safety for online shopping is not restricted to the avoidance of fraudulent sites or open public Wi-Fi networks. Legitimate retailers can also become victims of cyber criminals. This is especially possible in cases of a data breach. In such cases, user details are stolen. So, to prevent data breaches and leaks, users need to keep a strong password for their online shopping accounts. Ideally, passwords should contain uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters so that it gets difficult to guess and access sensitive information for hackers and other kinds of malicious cybercriminals on various shopping sites.
6. Enable 2-Factor Authentication
Online retailers and users should use two-factor-authentication (TFA) on their account access pages. With this TFA feature, cybercriminals will not be able to access users’ accounts even if they discover their passwords. The second layer of security beyond the password makes user accounts a little more unreachable for hackers.
