Buying Online
Many people have discovered the world of online shopping and are now choosing to shop via the Internet because of the lower costs for many if not all products. For someone that is new at shopping online, the entire process may not be as easy as they might suspect. One of the most important things in buying online is making sure that you are buying from a reputable seller (See our safe shopping article) - this goes for auctions as well as websites.
An imperative characteristic to notice when buying from websites is to make sure that the web site uses SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer. When you are at the main page of a site you are about to make a purchase at, you will most likely see something like the picture below
You will notice that the address begins with "http://". This is not a secure website - by that, I mean it doesn't use SSL to protect data that you submit. Usually this is fine; in this case we are at the home page of Paypal. When you click on the "Log-In" button, you will see "https://" before the "www.paypal.com..." which you can see below
You will also see this padlock icon in the bottom corner of your browser, either right or left depending on the browser you are using. (These pictures are all from Internet Explorer). Both the "https://" and the padlock icon indicate that the information you send (credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc) is being encrypted and is well protected from interception by a hacker.
If you double click the padlock icon, you should see this screen, shown below, which tells you the "security certificate" that is designed to verify the identity of a website, and also provide a certain level of trustworthiness for that website.
Thawte.com and Verisign.com are both reputable and long standing companies that verify websites integrity and offer SSL Certificates (click any of these links for more information about SSL Security Certificates). Remember that you can always go to www.google.com or any other search engine and find out a lot of both positive and negative feedback about any online retailer or SSL Security Certificate issuer. Happy safe shopping!
Last Updated: 10/15/2008