Online Shopping is Good, But Poses a Number of Risks
eCommerce stores/online shopping have today made our lives so much easy when it comes to shopping. We can shop from our places of convenience at anytime and have our product(s) delivered right to our door steps.
These stores are rising at a fast pace as traditional business today realize the benefits of technology when it comes to promoting business. However much these stores are ultra-convenient, speedy, accessible from different connected devices — they poses a lot of risk like criminals who target retail customers mostly even if these reputable online retailers have strong security systems.
What are some of the risks we are talking about. Here are our editor’s reasons;
Identity Theft
One of the most common risks of online shopping is of identity theft and there’s no doubt about this. Attackers get hold of your personal information for instance; steals your card number then your entire checking account is exposed. They use your information to make their personal purchases, draining your account where the victim might not be aware at all.
Obtaining your card details can be though phishing attacks, fake online stores, or when your card is stolen, to mention a few.
Fake Reviews
Majority of online shoppers base their choice of product(s) on reviews. A collection of five-star ratings can do amazing things for online sellers. With this result after purchasing the product one ends up getting something way different from what they read from the reviews.
Stores or online sellers have gone to an extent of paying off a group of people to write these fake reviews. Forbes reported that some authors have confessed to posting fake reviews. So it is recommended that one be skeptical of reviews that lack detail, or are too positive.
Counterfeit Goods
This is one of the major problems that online buyers have and are facing with online stores. Note that online stores work with different sellers to have their products sold on their platform. Therefore some of these sellers present counterfeit goods that some stores might not notice. Even Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is having difficulty keeping counterfeits off its site.
Counterfeit goods are sometimes seen on their price. The price is too good to be true, thus be aware or do a research on that particular products comparing to other online stores.
Fake Online Stores
There are hundreds of fake online stores that trick people into purchasing products. The truth is, there are no products and these are just scammers here to steal your money.
These fake online stores, have which unbelievable or too good to be true prices and fake reviews for their fake products. To them everything is fake, their aim is to lure people to think these products exist and get their money in return. There have been various incidents where buyers never got what they ordered and spent money in the online transaction.
Another reason for falling for this tactic is that these people make their sites appear as legitimate online stores. There are just slight changes in the name which are not that obvious and are easy to miss.
