Every time you shop online, there’s that moment: You’ve pushed your virtual shopping cart around the site and handed over your credit card number. Now you wait.Will your chosen goodies live up to their tantalizing descriptions and photos? Usually, you’re tickled when the package arrives. That leather messenger bag or those slightly used CDs are exactly how you imagined them. Other times you end up disappointed, or worse.

In a new ShopSmart poll conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, one-third of women who have shopped online in the past year said they had a negative experience. Among those women, 20 percent said they never got the item they ordered. Another 13 percent said the merchandise was very different than represented. And 3 percent said that as a result of buying online, their credit-card information was stolen.

Online shopping may be as routine as touching up your lipstick, but on the Internet, price tags can change suddenly and a dishonest cashier could clear out your bank account, leaving you broke and empty-handed. To protect yourself, follow these three simple steps.

1

Make sure you pay the lowest price every time.
You probably already know the virtues of price-comparison sites like Shopzilla.com and Froogle.com, which sweep the Internet to find the lowest prices for a selected item. No matter what you’re shopping for, it always pays to check more than one of these sites because, as our research has found, no one site always has the best deals. (See best and worst new price-comparison sites.)

But once you’ve found what seems like a steal, don’t dawdle. That price could change at any moment, thanks to a little-known trick called “dynamic pricing,” which simply means that you could be charged a different amount for the same item than someone else. The price you’re offered may depend on the time of day, the availability of a product, and whether you’ve looked at the item online before, which is trackable through the use of cookies, those electronic footprints we leave when we travel the Internet.

For example, if you leave an item in your online shopping cart and come back to it later, the price could rise slightly because the seller now knows you’re serious about buying. And that practice is probably legal, according to Robert M. Weiss, a lawyer who specializes in information technology law at Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg in Chicago.

You see “dynamic” pricing all the time both online and in stores, he says. The difference is that a local retailer does it out in the open. A movie theater, for example, may charge a lower rate for children. The only time it would be considered illegal is when the price difference is based on an illegal criterion such as the race of the customer.




Travel sites are a prime example of dynamic pricing. Prices for a given itinerary can fluctuate due to the availability of rooms and flights, but they may also vary depending on your shopping behavior. ShopSmart compared costs for several plane tickets on two computers--one that accepted cookies and another that didn’t--and got very different results. On an Expedia search for a ticket from New York to Sydney, Australia, the browser without cookies spit out several flights and fares ranging from $1,770 to $1,950 that we didn’t see on the browser with cookies. The browser with cookies, however, coughed up a $2,116 fare not found on the other. A spokeswoman for Expedia told us, “There is no user differentiation based on browser or computer type.” She claimed the different results were due to different search criteria, even though we entered the same parameters for each trip. But George Hobica, president of the Web site Airfarewatchdog.com, which tracks airline fares, says he has found that many things can affect the price you get, including your browser, cookies, and even your geographical location. Some sites use regional servers that aren’t all updated at the same time.

We also found price fluctuations at Zappos.com, an online retailer specializing in shoes. On a Saturday, Nine West Jonni high-heeled bridal shoes were $79. The following Wednesday, they were $82.95. When we contacted Zappos.com, its CEO, Tony Hsieh, said that the company’s mission “includes being responsive to consumer demand and offering a large selection of products .... Accordingly, the pricing of products may fluctuate depending on consumer supply and demand.”

These kinds of shenanigans may be legal, but that doesn’t mean you need be a willing participant. Try these tricks when comparing prices online:

2

Make sure you buy from a trustworthy site.
If you’re squeamish about buying online, stick to sites that have physical stores nearby. Retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Staples let you return most items ordered online to their stores. If you’ve got a beef, you can take it up with the store manager.

With Web-only sites, your recourse may be limited to sending e-mail to an anonymous address. So look carefully at “seller ratings.” That’s especially true if you’re shopping on eBay, says Lynn Dralle, author of “The 100 Best Things I’ve Sold on eBay.” Stick with sellers who have a minimum of 98 percent positive ratings, she advises. (That’s the minimum required by PayPal for full protection under its Buyer Protection Policy and a good indicator that the seller is reputable.) And be sure the vendor has been an eBay member for at least six months. “A lot of the scams I hear about are from sellers who signed up a week ago,” she says. “They’ll pick a user ID, burn through some customers, and then disappear.”

If you’re not shopping on eBay, peruse search engines such as PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, and Yahoo Shopping. They list user reviews that allow customers to rate not only the product but also the site they bought it from. Shopping.com, for example, lets users award scores of one through five check marks based on customer service and on-time delivery. Yahoo Shopping has a similar system based on price, ease of purchase, and customer service.

But watch out: Good vendor ratings are no guarantee you won’t be ripped off. Shopzilla, for example, bestows a “customer certified” designation on sellers that maintain ratings of satisfactory or better. But at least one “customer certified” vendor we checked out, cell-phone company Wirefly.com, had thousands of customer complaints lodged against it. The company’s Better Business Bureau report revealed that its parent company, InPhonic, had racked up more than 3,000 complaints in the past three years as well as a lawsuit filed by the Office of the Attorney General for the City of Washington, D.C., in June 2006. The suit, which was recently settled, alleged the company failed to disclose hidden charges and didn’t send customers promised rebates, among other things. InPhonic spokesman Tripp Donnelly says the company has worked to correct the problems by hiring a bigger rebate-fulfillment firm and increasing the size of its customer-service staff.




So what’s a Web shopper to do? Don’t just look at how many check marks a vendor snagged. Read reviews from several different sites, focusing on the negative ones, suggests Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research, a technology and market research company. Are the situations described something you can live with? “Some reviews say things like ‘the customer-service agent was mean to me,’ ” she says. “That’s fairly innocuous.” But numerous reports of late delivery, damaged goods, or bait-and-switch tactics are a big red flag.

Also try typing the name of the retailer and the words “scam” or “rip-off” into Google or another search engine. You might be surprised at what pops up. Mulpuru did that recently when checking out a travel company. Although the company was too small to be listed on major shopping sites, “there were all kinds of listings from people who were scammed,” she says. And don’t forget to check the Better Business Bureau. (Go to www.bbb.org and click on “business.”)

Finally, eyeball the site itself before buying. It should clearly list an address and a phone number, as well as the name of the parent company, if any. Does it spell out all service, transaction, and handling fees, as well as shipping costs? What are its policies for returns, exchanges, or cancellations? And what is the site’s privacy policy? It should state how your personal data will be used and whether it will track your online movements through cookies or other technology.

Be on the lookout for misspellings or bad grammar, two hallmarks of amateurish sites that may be trying to rip you off, says Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch, which seeks to improve Web content credibility. Also avoid sites that use a lot of pop-up ads or disable your Back button. “Those are low-grade, low-rent tactics to move you in a particular direction,” Brendler says.

3

Pick the right way to pay.
The best way to protect yourself against financial mayhem after hitting the Buy button is to use a credit card rather than a check, money order, or debit card. With a credit card, if your number falls into the wrong hands, you’re liable only for the first $50 in charges, and most large card issuers waive liability altogether. And if you’ve got a legitimate beef--say, that “authentic” Coach purse is a knockoff--it’s relatively easy to get the charges reversed. You must notify the card company within 60 days after the charge appears and provide proof that you tried to settle the dispute with the seller first. If that doesn’t work, the credit-card company can take the money back from a merchant, says Joe Ridout, spokesman for Consumer Action, an advocacy group in San Francisco. “It’s a very powerful tool for consumers who feel they didn’t get what they paid for.”

Debit cards are another story. When you pay with one of these cards, you have fewer protections. Once the money’s sucked out of your account, you can contact your bank to see if it will handle the dispute. But it may decide not to take any action, which means you’ll have to take on the merchant yourself.




That’s what happened to Diane Dobry. After buying some tea in December of last year from a site called TheTea.com, she never received the goods. The company claimed it tried to send the package, but Dobry says TheTea.com failed to use Federal Express as she had specified and paid for. While Dobry was haggling with the company, its Web site suddenly disappeared. (When we punched up TheTea.com, all that appeared was a message saying the site is unavailable.) Dobry reported the problem to her bank and the Better Business Bureau but the company didn’t reply. And she’s still out the money.

Money orders and checks offer even fewer protections than debit cards. But credit cards aren’t without risks, of course. Many people are worried about hackers stealing their credit-card number as it flies through cyberspace, though consumers’ fears about this particular threat are overblown, says Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner Inc., a technology consulting firm. A little padlock symbol on a Web page means it’s encrypted, so if a thief grabs it while you’re online, all he’ll get is gobbledygook. The real danger crops up after your data reaches its destination.




“Because of encryption, thieves have all gone to taking data at rest rather than data in transit,” says Litan. That was certainly the case in the well-publicized breach at TJX Companies, which owns T.J.Maxx and Marshalls. In January, the company announced that it had suffered an “unauthorized intrusion” into the computer system that processes and stores credit- and debit-card payments, resulting in the theft of 45.7 million card numbers. In a written statement the company advised customers to “carefully review their credit card and debit-card statements for unauthorized use.”

That’s sage advice for anyone, actually. Try to use one card for all of your online purchases. Unauthorized transactions will jump out if they’re not mixed in with other household purchases. Also consider one of the new payment systems that have cropped up recently (see the chart at right). The good news is that the vast majority of online transactions happen seamlessly and painlessly. But as in much of life, a little skepticism goes a long way.

Click any of the links below for a selection of articles from the Spring 2007 issue of ShopSmart;) Editor's Letter Greetings from ShopSmart Editor-in-Chief Lisa Lee Freeman Five ways to shop smarter Online and off, these tips will help you get the best deals Great sites for gift givers Fun and funky presents to buy online for grads, dads, brides, and anyone else on your list How to order wine Order the right wine at any restaurant (even if you have no idea what you're doing) Vitamins Which multivitamins should you take, if any?