Shopping Online

For many users, shopping online is easier than shopping at traditional "bricks-and-mortar" retailers. You can sit down in front of your computer screen at any time of the day or night, and use your PC to search the Web for just the right item you want to buy you don't have to get dressed, start your car, or bother with boisterous crowds.

How to Shop Safely

To purchase an item online, all you have to do is enter your name, address, and credit card number, and the online merchant will arrange to have the item delivered directly to your house within a matter of days. It's that easy!

The big online retailers are just as reputable as traditional retailers, offering safe payment, fast shipping, and responsive service. Just to be safe, look for the following features before you shop at a given site:

• Payment by major credit card. (Not being able to accept credit cards is the sign of either a very small or fly-by-night merchant.)

• A secure server that encrypts your credit card information and keeps online thieves from stealing your credit card numbers. (You'll know that you're using a secure site when the little lock icon appears in the lower right corner of your Web browser.)

• Good contact information email address, street address, phone number, fax number, and so on. (You want to be able to physically contact the retailer if something goes wrong.)

  tip

  

  Credit card purchases are protected by the Fair Credit Billing Act, which gives you the right to dispute certain charges and limits your liability for unauthorized transactions to $50. In addition, some card issuers offer a supplemental guarantee that says you're not responsible for any unauthorized charges made online. (Make sure that you read your card's statement of terms to determine the company's exact liability policy.)

  
  

• A stated returns policy and satisfaction guarantee. (You want to be assured that you'll be taken care of if you don't like whatever you ordered.)

• A stated privacy policy that protects your personal information. (You don't want the online retailer sharing your email address and purchasing information with other merchants and potential spammers.)

• Information before you finalize your order that tells you whether the item is in stock and how long it will take to ship. (More feedback is better.)

Making an Online Purchase

If you've never shopped online before, you're probably wondering just what to expect. Shopping over the Web is actually quite easy; all you need is your computer and a credit card and a fast connection to the Internet!

It really doesn't matter which retailer you shop at; the process of online shopping is pretty much the same all over. You proceed through a multiple-step process that goes like this:

1. Find a product either by browsing or searching through the site.
   
   

2. Examine the product by viewing the photos and information on a product listing page, similar to the one shown in Figure 24.1.
   
   

   Figure 24.1. Examining the merchandise at Amazon.com.

   
   
   

3. Order the product, by clicking a Buy It Now button on the product listing page, which puts the item in your online "shopping cart."
   
   

4. Check out by entering your payment and shipping information.
   
   

5. Confirm your order and wait for the merchant to ship your merchandise.
   
   

That's it! You should receive your order in a few days.

Finding the Best Prices Online

Now that you know how to shop, where should you spend your money online? Just a few short years ago, if you wanted to find the best bargains on the Web, you had to manually visit the sites of dozens of different online retailers a very time-consuming process. Not so today, as there are numerous sites that exist to automatically do this price comparison for you. Go to a price comparison site, find the product you want, and have the site return a list of merchants offering that product, along with current prices. Choose the merchant that offers what you want, and you're ready to buy!

The best of these price comparison sites offer more than just pricing information. These full-service sites let you sort and filter their search results in a number of different ways, and often include customer reviews of both the products and the available merchants. Some even let you perform side-by-side comparisons of multiple products, which is great if you haven't yet made up your mind as to what you want to buy. (Figure 24.2 shows one such product comparison at Shopping.com.)

Figure 24.2. Comparing products and prices at Shopping.com.

The most popular (and useful) of these price comparison sites include

• BizRate (www.bizrate.com)

• Froogle (froogle.google.com)

• mySimon (www.mysimon.com)

• NexTag (www.nextag.com)

• PriceGrabber.com (www.pricegrabber.com)

• Shopping.com (www.shopping.com)

• Yahoo! Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com)

Want to find the best bargains online? Then check out my companion book, Bargain Hunter's Secrets to Online Shopping (Que, 2004), available in bookstores everywhere.