Is Shopping Online At Amazon Really Safe

Making purchases online can be an intimidating experience; especially the part of the transaction where you’re required to enter your checking account information or bank card number for the merchant to use. The mere thought of sending that type of sensitive information throughout cyberspace is the sole reason that millions of people have yet to discover the true purchasing power of the internet.

While there are millions of fly by night websites out there that do not necessarily take your personal information seriously, there are also just as many legitimate vendors that conduct hundreds or even thousands of transactions online every day through secure channels that even the best hackers can not begin to penetrate. This method of security is known as encryption and in recent years the technology has seriously flourished, but the downside is that it is often quite expensive to implement. That’s why huge mega-websites like Amazon.com are considered completely safe while the smaller mom and pop businesses are not; it all has to do with their security certificates and their ability to repel hackers.

Now, this does not mean that all online shopping websites out there are legitimate and with your best interests in mind, because programmers will often create what is called a “spoof” website to trick you into thinking that you’re shopping with one of the more trusted virtual locations. The tactic to lure you onto these copied webpages is normally completed by sending you an email that says it is from a trusted seller, but with a closer inspection it is easy to spot these from a mile away. The easiest method is to examine the actual email address (to the right of the business name in the “from” category) and any of the links contained within the document (by highlighting the link itself and looking at the address in the bottom left corner of the page). If the email claims to be from Amazon, for example, the email address will be something like xxx@ amazon.com and the link will read www .amazon.com (without the spaces in there). If the addresses or link reads anything else, no matter how similar (like www. sale.amazon.com), it is likely fake.

Along those same lines, if you receive an email from a website that you frequent often, the same message or links should be available on their server for you to read after you log in at their website. Instead of clicking the link to check and see if it’s valid, type the address in manually (or click the link from your favorites if you have it bookmarked) so there is no doubt about your safety. Another smart tip is to look at the first four or five letters of the website address; “http” or “https.” That “s” on the end means that the website is secure and you should always see this on a payment or checkout screen. If the payment page is not secure, then buy elsewhere.

One more piece of advice is to avoid promotional websites designed to offer special discounts or savings off of the larger web destinations like Amazon. Not all of them are legitimate, and your chances of aimlessly clicking popups off of your screen or clicking a link that goes to a spoof website are very good if you just pick one of these links at random.

So to get back to the original question about the safety of shopping at Amazon.com, the website itself is completely secure. If you have any doubt which website you are actually on, you can go to the shopping cart, then look at the address bar at the top of your browser to verify that the website address of the shopping cart starts with something like “https://www.amazon.com/”, which means you are on the authentic Amazon.com site and can securely enter your personal information and payment details.