Skip to main content

Shopping Online – Protect Yourself

A slight change of tack - I though that the following article makes a good point:

Shopping Online -– Protect Yourself

These days, there are great bargains to be found by shopping
online. Many items that previously were only available in
stores are now being bought and sold online every day. Books,
cds, DVDs and electronics are all growing in popularity as
online purchases. Then there are things like flights, hotel
bookings, car rentals and the like that are which are well
established in the online shopping world. More and more stores
are putting up websites that allow you to make online orders
and even supermarkets now let you do your grocery shopping
online and they'’ll deliver the goods to your door.

Added to this growth in stores and other big business websites,
there are also millions of small traders offering you goods
online too. Online auction sites such as eBay are experiencing
phenomenal success. These types of purchases however carry the
risk that you do not really know who you are dealing with but
you have to give them sensitive financial information in order
to pay for your purchases. You are forced to choose between
buying from small sellers and then trust them with your card
details, or forgo the opportunities they offer and deal only
with large and trusted names.

Payment Sites

This problem has been recognized and that is why it is now
possible to shop online from lots of small sellers while
maintaining your privacy and keeping your financial information
secure. There are payment sites with the most popular probably
being PayPal, that are set up specifically to deal with issues
like these. Indeed, PayPal is now owned by eBay, which shows
the link in importance between the two services offered by
these companies.

What websites like PayPal allow you to do is open an online
account for free. You can then transfer money into your account
using a standard credit card payment procedure. The advantage of this is that while you are providing your card information to PayPal, this is the only company who you are giving this information to and since they are large and therefore, hopefully, trustworthy, your privacy and security should be safe.

Then when you make all your various purchases with smaller,
more anonymous traders, all you do is make the payment through
paypal and this avoids all the dangers having to give all your
sensitive data out again and again. It is another example of
how using credit cards online are becoming safer and more
convenient.



About The Author: Joseph Kenny is the webmaster of the UK
credit card comparison site http://www.creditcards121.com/,
where you can find a selection of credit card advice. For US
visitors there is also the comparison site
http://www.credit-cards-info.com/


Of course we offer BitPass as well as PayPal payment arrangements which offers similar benefits although you can fund your BitPass account from PayPal and further limit the exposure of your details to smaller traders like us. At our online contemporary music store you can also use PayPal's creditcard processing facilities to make payments to us.

We have considered going for one of the "trust" marks but considered that the cost to us compared to the benefit to purchasers of a few tracks was not worth it - be interested to see any comments on that judgment.

Popular posts from this blog

Introducing Children To Music… Strategies For Success

While we struggle to restore full menu fuctionality We thought you'd like to hear about a more uplifting topic: Introducing Children To Music - Strategies For Success I've heard a million parents lament the fact that they didn'’t get their children interested in music sooner. There are also hundreds of adults out there that wish they had learned how to play an instrument when they were younger. Studies actually support the idea that music stimulates certain brain connections and can actually help children grow smarter! Music also provides an invaluable outlet for safe expression of feelings and emotions, and can also serve as an important learning tool throughout your children's lives! Music helps educate in many ways, by developing children'’s memory skills and nourishing their spirit. Now, some children are a bit resistant to music at first, but you can easily find ways to encourage them to enjoy music in many different forms early in life. You need to simply adop

Customer Contact

Working over the internet you tend not to have too much customer contact. You can see the visitors coming through the site and what they stop to look at or in our case listen to. Even when they progress from visitor to customer the flow of funds and goods are achieved automatically and there is little human contact. So it is quite nice from time to time to get those little e-mail challenges like the one yesterday who couldn't find his downloaded files. It turns out that he had fallen victim to Microsoft's help in the way of hidden files on XP. Those of us who grew up on 2000 are used to being able to thread our way all round our directory structures - even unto the depths of our temp files with all their wondrous collections of cookies. In XP by default users, including those with admin priviliges, are not trusted to see these nether regions or even be aware that they are there but when IE is also configured to automatically put downloaded files there we have a problem. Of cour