Shop smart online during the holidays
I always offer advice this time of year for how to avoid online shopping scams during the holiday season. There are several factors that make it even more important to shop smart this year, and to shop early:
Supply chain disruptions are negatively impacting the production of goods, the shipment of goods manufactured overseas, and the transportation of goods to retailer warehouses and stores.
Retailers already struggling with a tight labor market will face even more challenges hiring the tens of thousands of temporary workers they normally add during the holidays.
Delivery companies like Fedex and UPS will also struggle to find the extra workers they need to handle increased holiday volumes.
Shoppers will likely find fewer discounts as online and brick-and-mortar retailers with tight inventories see less reason to cut prices.
Online purchase scams accounted for almost 40 percent of the scams reported to the BBB’S Scam Tracker service in 2020 and I’m sure that number would have been higher in 2021 even without the aggravating factors cited above. They’ll likely cause even more shoppers to let their guard down when they see an ad touting plentiful supplies of this year’s hot toy or other must have item they can’t find at a store. And at a great price.
Crooks create lookalike websites that appear to belong to a reputable retailer but have an extra word or other change to the URL. The BBB issued an alert several years ago about a fake Pandora jewelry website called pandorapick.com; the real website is pandora.net. People who ordered merchandise from the phony website got nothing or knock-offs made in China. People are doing more shopping on their phones and the small screens make it even more difficult to detect phony URLS.
BBB research has found that the main reason people fall for online scams is the attraction of a low price. Be suspicious of websites claiming to have items that are hard to find elsewhere and at steep discounts.
Check out the company with the BBB and online using words like “complaints” and “reviews.” As I write this column, we’re receiving complaints about an online retailer purporting to sell name-brand appliances and electronics at great prices. We had no record of the company prior to receiving the first complaint and the Google street view of the address in Olive Branch shows a warehouse with no name on it. The few online reviews I found are all bad, with one person saying “I was robbed.”
I’m not going to name the company yet because we haven’t had time to verify if it’s truly a scam, but it’s disappointing that people would order merchandise from an online company without doing any due diligence on it.
The BBB offers these additional tips for shopping safely online:
Look for “https” (the s is for “secure”) and a small lock icon in the address bar before entering payment or personal information.
Don’t be fooled by professional looking photos of merchandise and watch for bad grammar.
Be wary if the only way to contact the company is by filling out a form on the website.
Use a credit card so you’ll have some recourse if something goes wrong. Be wary if you can’t pay with a credit card.