Use Merchant Ratings for Better Online Safety

If you are one of the 885 million Internet users worldwide who have shopped online, you probably appreciate the convenience and seemingly infinite choices when shopping on your computer. In fact, it would be difficult to find any product that cannot be purchased on the Internet and shipped directly to your home or office. Online purchasing also allows comparison shopping from website to website all with just a few clicks of your mouse.

But with online shopping comes the challenge of finding reputable merchants. Not only will you be trusting them with your credit card information, but also that their products and customer service will be up to your standards. How do you find the right merchant when you could be ordering from anywhere in the world?

Online merchant ratings

There are many comparison shopping sites that offer consumer ratings of online merchants. These ratings are a good indicator as to the reliability of the company you'll be doing online business with. Since nearly 60 percent of online shoppers feel uncomfortable when purchasing from a company that is unknown to them, these merchant ratings can put your mind at ease when buying on the Web.

How merchant ratings are compiled

BizRate.com (owned by Shopzilla), PriceGrabber.com, and Nextag.com are just a few of the many sites offering merchant ratings to consumers. Generally, the ratings are compiled from surveys (either through the shopping search site or on the merchant's site) completed by actual customers who have purchased products from the merchant. These surveys are extensive and include every aspect of the overall shopping experience, from ease of navigation and checkout to product quality and customer service satisfaction.

Finding reputable merchant ratings

Just as there are good and bad merchants online, there are also good and bad shopping search sites. The key to obtaining reliable reviews is checking out each site and reading how they gather the information that makes up the merchant reviews. Reliable sites should include the following, or similar, criteria:

• Reviewers must prove they have purchased a product from the online merchant
• Reviewers are limited to the number of reviews they submit per merchant in a 30 day period
• In a review for one merchant, a second merchant will never be mentioned

Each comparison shopping site should include information about how their ratings are compiled and what standards are in place to bar manipulation (ratings being skewed against one merchant by another).