E-commerce continues to grow, and everything points to it as the main medium for purchasing in the medium term. And although the purchase of products over the Internet has improved a lot over the years, being much safer and simpler as it was the last decade, it is still necessary to take into account a number of keys to buy securely on the Internet. Because even if it doesn’t seem like it, the problem is not buying on the Internet, but how and where we do it. That’s why we’re going to explain these keys one by one so that we don’t get upset that nobody is exempt from, even the most experienced users of the network.

This is an essential factor when making purchases on the Internet, which is that the page on which we are buying is secure. And we can check this from the browser itself. If you have a secure connection, you will see a padlock on the left side of the search bar and usually the message “It’s secure”. It works like a traffic light, and we can see the different safety messages in a colour code, where green is the safest connection and red is obviously the least secure. However, this does not completely protect us, because we can buy from a reputable vendor on a secure site.

Know the seller’s reputation and essential data

One of the great dangers of the Internet is that we don’t know for sure who we’re dealing with when we’re buying from a particular seller. We can find a product at a very good price, extraordinarily low, but know nothing about that seller. It is not the same to buy on Amazon or Aliexpress, where there are certain guarantees of purchase, warranty and return of product, as on a website where everything seems to be taken with tweezers. A good way to try to find out more about the seller is to try to contact him beforehand or check the address of his business.

From my own experience I can assure you that I have found Chinese stores that offered top-brand products at very low prices and that according to their contact details were located in the suburbs of an average American city. Common sense is very important in these cases, and if we don’t see logic or guarantees in the products and guarantees offered, it’s better to look elsewhere.

Another alternative is to look for comments from other users about that store, you will see how in some cases are revealing, anticipating the problems we could suffer from buying in it. In these cases, it is of little use to check legal texts or shipping or return policies, because they are usually all paperless, which is why it is essential to detect anomalies in the data and nature of the seller.

Pay safely and securely

This is a fundamental element of Internet shopping, payment. Without a doubt, our main concern when paying on the Internet is the security of transactions, and here we must also take many precautions. Using secure payment platforms is a guarantee that in case of fraud, our money will be safe. There are services such as Paypal, which not only give us confidence when we decide to pay in a particular store, but also offers real security in our payments.

Here you can consult an interesting guide on how to use Paypal, create an account, problems and solutions. These services can refund our money in the event of a fraudulent sale, either in a shop or in a transaction between individuals. There are Chinese stores that have payment gateways in that country where we have no way to check their legal status or contact them in case of fraud, and using payment methods such as Paypal is always a guarantee of security.

Many stores of dark purposes offer a design moderately similar to that of a brand of recognized prestige, but they offer us those same products at a much lower price. In these cases we may be faced with two situations, fake products and rough copies, or directly sellers who never send us the products we have purchased. Of the latter there are sadly many cases of Asian shops.