Description

Whether you're Christmas shopping online, shopping for Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or any other holiday, nothing takes the spirit out of the season quite like a case of fraud. Grinchy online scammers are always looking to separate you from your valuable personal data. That said, following these simple tips for safe online holiday shopping, you can safely buy gifts online without worry.

Transcript

Knowing whether or not a website you’re making a purchase on is safe and credible is extremely important. There are couple of ways to check up on them. As an example, I’m going to first search for a product I want to buy on Google Products Search. Here on the right, I can see that there are reviews for sites like overstock.com, walmart, and amazon.com. Just click on seller ratings and you can read reviews that people have left about the site itself, in this case amazon.com, and not the product they want to buy. This is important information because you don’t want to buy from the site that has a bad reputation for customer service or doesn’t take returns. Another way to protect yourself is to read a website’s privacy policy. Any website where you’ll be making a purchase of any kind should have a privacy policy. And if they don’t, then I wouldn’t recommend buying from them. You can usually find a privacy policy at the bottom of a company’s home page. Here, it says Privacy Notice and it’s pretty small. But you should be able to find it on any site. You want to make sure to read through it carefully. So that way you’ll know what happens to your information after you enter it in like with your credit card numbers, your address, your phone number, any personal information. You obviously don’t want else having these private details. So make sure you read through the policy if you really want to be sure that you’re protected. Thanks for watching and don’t miss the next episode in the Shopping Safely and Finding Deals Online series.