Shoppers beware

It’s that time of the year; the Spam is piling up along with paper fliers from regular snail mail. All these promotion aren’t a complete waste Wal-Mart has demonstrated annually; that they always have at least on item that’s priced much cheaper then any other retailer (this year their big item is a 100 dollar DVD/VCR a device that normally goes for closer to 200 dollars). Other companies like Radio Shack, Lows Home Improvement warehouse,Home Depot and many others are have excellent deals lined up for the holidays. Which isn’t surprising as black Friday is less then a day away (Black Friday has traditionally been the day retailers begin to enter the plus financially and everything they sell is pure profit so in their books they change from red ink (negative) to black ink(positive).)

There is however basic precautions people should take when shopping online. First and foremost make sure your shopping at a real e-commerce site and not a site scam artists have designed. If the company has a phone number posted and can accept visa the company is probably legit. If you’re placing a large order it may be worth doing some research just to make sure. The Better Business Bureau is an excellent place to verify you’re not being scammed and that the company you intend to do business with is in good standing. Bizrate.com is great place to find good product at reasonable prices from reputable companies. If you’re interested in normal people’s opinions of online stores and products eopinions.com is an excellent source.

Something you might consider avoiding this year is online auction sites such as Ebay, Yahoo, and Ubid. I’ve found that shopping auction sites for the holidays isn’t such a great idea and a number of things can go wrong. The worse thing being you get ripped off, second being your don’t get your merchandise on time (which happens a lot more then one might like). If you must shop auctions make sure the person you’re buying from has an excellent rating with no complaints. With any auction you should always mail the seller and ask questions. Remember anything shipped via USPS media mail (books, music, magazines) can take up to four weeks to arrive. And finally as a precaution you should never click into an online commerce site or an online auction site from an email, it’s been reported many times over that scam artists have created replicas of sites like Ebay that they scam people into going to for the sole puprpose of ripping them off, users update their information (including credit card info, and passwords) thinking they're on ebay.com but the information never goes to Ebay, instead it’s stored on the scammers website and then used to rip you off.