Online Shopping: Safe Practices

Dear Friends,

Thanks for visiting my blog.

These days Online Shopping has been the way of purchase of items like electronics, pendrives, computer accessories, shoes, even dresses, etc.

I see the following reasons on why online shopping is becoming very popular in India:

• Price
• Time Saving
• Door Step Delivery

I have known my friends who do online shopping very frequently and I personally have been shopping online starting with Ebay 7 years back and atleast 5 other websites till now.

Over the years I have known people who have lost lot of money or paid for inferior quality goods online and also lost faith in online shopping sites.

I personally have bought almost Rs. 40,000 worth of gadgets online over a period of 7 years, which is not a very huge figure when compared to my other friends.

Out of all my online purchases, I had problem with my recent purchase with site shopclues.com, I had problem that customer care is not responding to emails and they are not even picking the calls. I know lot of other people who had their orders delivered ontime from shopclues.com, but mine was totally different I got courier consignment number which is not valid number, not just me I could see that there are 10 other people who were facing same problem like me from their website feedback system and forums. After waiting for 15 good days and calling them almost daily and writing 2 emails I finally decided to use my WEAPON and it worked like a charm. I would explain the simple principles below.

Whenever I buy ONLINE i follow a specific RULE by which I am sure my MONEY is safe.

Always have a credit card with lower credit limits like Rs. 20,000 or so
Always PAY online purchases using low limit CREDIT CARD

The main advantage of doing so are as follows:
Because of lower limit, even if my card get hacked i won't loose much money so I can fearlessly shop on any website
I will have approximately 30 days from date of purchase to raise a dispute with my credit card company to stop payment for the purchase if i face any problem with item delivery or even quality.

With shopclues.com when i failed to contact them after trying for 15 days, I called my credit card company and raised a dispute and as expected, I got response to my emails the very next day afternoon and got a call from shopclues.com in the evening and they readily agreed to refund my payment. I told them if they can refund that is fine, otherwise my Credit Card company would take of the same as I raised a dispute and interestingly my order was cancelled and refund was initiated in 2 minutes after the call was disconnected.

I am a big fan of online shopping as it would save your some money and lot of time. So I would recommend you to do the following while buying online.

Check feedback of the site and also the particular seller (wherever applicable like ebay, shopclues, etc)
Pay using your lower limit CREDIT CARD
Make sure you try to communicate with customer care
When CC is Clue-Less then contact credit card company and raise dispute, while raising dispute you need to prove that you contacted customer care and they didn't respond.

Hope this helps.

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