Reputation check of sites to buy online without risk

When you want to buy something on the Internet, for example to look for discounted clothes, shoes at much lower prices or something else, you can find it many online shopping sites with huge discounts.

Unfortunately, there are many scam websites that are easily found on the Google search engine when searching for a brand or product followed by the word “cheap”, “discounted”, “wholesale”, “sales” or other, ready to offer products that don’t exist just to steal personal data, scam people and steal your credit card information.

In the following guide we will show you how to effectively check the reputation of e-shopping sitesso as to be able to buy security without running into problems or computer scams (still very present on the web, despite the much tighter police controls).

READ ALSO -> Ways to save on Amazon and buy at lower prices

1) Check reputation on TrustPilot

The first reputation check must be done on a serious and reliable review site such as TrustPilotwhere practically all online sales companies have a page where they collect positive and negative reviews, without any filter and without the possibility of cheating (you immediately see a scam site since it will be overwhelmed with negative reviews).

All we have to do is open the site and enter the link or name of the sales site with the super discounts: if the site doesn’t exist on TrustPilot, there are too few reviews and they all seem positive, the risk of scam is very high .

before buying anything make sure that the site you choose has at least 5,000 reviewsby reading both the positive and negative reviews: only after checking everything (even the answers from the seller or the site, which can certify the ownership of the page and respond to all the reviews) do we proceed with the purchase.

2) Check reputation of unknown links

If the irresistible offers come from a link on Facebook, on WhatsApp or on social networks in general, it can be a good idea check the reputation of sites in real time using an extension like WOTinstallable on Google Chromeare Mozilla Firefox come on Microsoft Edge.

By installing this extension we will get a colored circle next to each link that comes our way: if the circle is green the site is safe or has enough positive reviews, if instead the circle is yellow or red the risk of scam is very high.

To be on the safe side, we avoid all the sites indicated by WOT as yellow and red, making further investigations and checks on all the links classified as gray or white (not yet correctly categorized by WOT due to the few reviews obtained).

On WOT we can read our guide on how to check dangerous links and suspicious sites with WOT.

3) Check HTTPS support

This trick is essential for effectively identify safe sites from scam sites: any online payment must be made on sites that have the address with a valid certificate (padlock at the top left of the address bar and start of the HTTPS link), otherwise it is better to give up.

Some scam sites have HTTPS only on the initial pages or presentation pages, but rarely manage to obtain the certificate even for the payment pages or for the cart pages (precisely because they were born to scam people).

In this regard we can read about how enable HTTPS on all sites.

4) Look up information about the company

A good reputation check can be done against the company that manages the siteusually available at the bottom of the page with a lot of VAT number or similar.

A shop, even if foreign, must always belong to a company whose name can be searched on Google to find a telephone number, an address and some identifying information. There may also be private citizens in the world who sell illegally, but that would be a bit strange.

For Italian companies we can also read our guide on how to find emails of every person, company, professional or public body.

5) Compare domain creation date

If the site claims to be born in 2005 and there is text that says “Copyright 2005-2022” it’s worth actually seeing if this was the case. To do this, just go to the site Whois and enter the address or domain, so as to verify its creation if it corresponds or if it has only been active for a few months.

As a general rule better avoid buying clothes or anything else from websites that are too young, even if they seem reliableunless they have already acquired a proven reputation or are partners of well-known brands (always in a proven way).

6) Verify the owner of the website

The online store site may not be from the same company. From the whois data obtained from the previous chapter it is possible to see if the site has been registered in Beijing (China) or in particular places where tax controls are not exactly the best.

Just like before, let’s avoid buying shoes or clothes from a website that has been registered in China, because it’s certainly not an original reseller, unless it’s an actually Chinese brand or if you’re willing to buy a fake.

A good site where you can find cheap products is definitely AliExpress but here too you need to pay attention to scams, as seen in our guide on how to buy on AliExpress in Italy.

7) Analyze the domain name

If you search the site name on Google and yes they find various similar sites with similar domain For example: buy-cheap-shoes.com, buycheapshoes.com, super-cheap-shoes.com or similar, it is better to avoid buying from clones of clones, who only try to confuse people to buy on sites similar to the originals but better indexed, so as to encourage the scam.

A legitimate website should never contain the word “cheap” or the brand name in the internet address and if there are more similar sites it means that it is a trick to get found and cheat as many people as possible.

8) Check the language used

A site can also contain grammatical errors but if these are many and gross, which seem to be due to an automatic translation, then better to be wary, initially focusing only on sites that support the Italian language and that provide assistance in the Italian language (to fix any problems).

The best sites of this kind can be found in our guide to sites to buy clothes and shoes with free shipping and returns.

Conclusions

By following all these tips we do not take the risk of buying online from scam sitesavoiding giving away money to scammers or giving away your login or credit card details to professional online thieves.

On the same topic we can read our ai guides safer online payment systems to make purchases and on best alternatives to amazon to buy online.