Safe online shopping: how to pay and what to check first

The payment method decides whether you have anything to work with when something goes wrong. A card payment can be disputed: your bank raises a chargeback with the merchant's bank and may return the money. The window is limited and it usually runs from the date the goods were due, not from the date you paid.

PayPal and comparable wallets carry their own buyer protection with their own deadlines. Read them once, before you need them.

A bank transfer offers no protection at all. Once the money has left, it is gone and your bank cannot pull it back. The same is true of cryptocurrency and gift cards — which is precisely why a fraudulent shop prefers them.

Cash on delivery, where it is offered, is a simple hedge: you pay when the parcel is physically in your hands. It does not protect you from a box of bricks, but it does protect you from a shop that never ships anything.

Two minutes is the minimum: find the trading name and registration number in the footer, look it up in the register of the country it claims to be in, and check how long the domain has existed. When a shop does not say who runs it, there is nobody to turn to in a dispute.

Read where returns go. A returns address on another continent, from a shop that presents itself as local, means sending anything back will cost more than the item.

Check the currency and the trader's country against each other. A site in your language, quoting your currency, run by a company registered somewhere with no consumer-protection route you can use, is a common and deliberate combination.

The real total only appears at the last step. Watch for shipping, a “handling fee” or insurance you did not ask for appearing between the basket and the payment screen.

A pre-ticked box consenting to a newsletter or an insurance add-on is only legitimate if you tick it yourself. In the EU and the UK a pre-ticked consent box is not valid consent, and it tells you what kind of operation you are dealing with.

Countdowns and “only two left” notices have one purpose: to stop you checking. An honest shop does not lose a customer because they slept on it.

The order confirmation, the payment record, a screenshot of the product page with its price, and the whole correspondence. Fraudulent shops disappear, and the evidence of what you actually ordered goes with them.

For a card payment, note the transaction date and the promised delivery date. The dispute window is counted from one of them, and three months later you will not remember either.