Goodyear resident Brenda Ramirez would rather drive to a brick-and-mortar store to shop than go online — even during the Valley’s blazing hot summers.
“I like to actually feel items, especially clothes,” said Ramirez, 39, as she walked to her car on a recent afternoon at Tanger Outlets in Glendale. “Plus, it’s an opportunity to just get out of the house.”
Inspecting an item in person helps you know what you do and don’t like about it, Ramirez said. “It’s sometimes hard to know what you’re getting, when you only see it online.”
Peoria resident Dianna Schaumberg agrees. “I don’t like buying much online,” the 48-year-old said. She has another concern: how secure her finances will be if she has to send personal data over the Internet.
But Randy Dobson of Surprise said he enjoys shopping online. “Maybe a little too much,” the 57-year-old said, laughing. “You get what you want. You don’t have to get only what’s in the store.”
He frequents eBay, saying he likes its PayPal system for secure transactions.
More consumers seem to side with Dobson, if the growth of e-buying is a testament.
U.S. retail e-commerce revenue reached an estimated $167 billion in 2010 and $225 billion in 2012, according to eMarketer, a market-research company based in New York City. By 2017, the company estimates it will have reached $434 billion.
At the same time, complaints traced to the e-buying experience also have increased, said Lesley Fair, senior attorney for the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Internet transactions represented 11 percent of the complaints received by the FTC in 2010; in 2012, they represented 12 percent of complaints.
“That may not seem to be a big increase, but in the scheme of things, it is,” Fair said. The actual number of complaints arising from Internet transactions increased from 53,519 in 2010 to 75,423 in 2012.
Arizona continues to be in the top tier of all states in the number of identity-theft complaints, although from 2011 to 2012 it dropped to eighth place from fourth, the FTC reported. However, year to year, the number of identity-theft complaints rose from 98.5 per 100,000 people in 2011 to 107.3 in 2012. There were 6,296 complaints in 2011, 7,032 in 2012.
The rise is a double-edged sword, Fair said: “Are there more complaints because there is more deception online or is it because more consumers are shopping online than before? The other issue is that more consumers are finding their voice and complaining to us.”
And although the FTC cannot negotiate individual disputes between consumers and businesses, reports help identify new scams or sites making deceptive claims. “We have to rely on consumers to be our eyes and ears,” Fair said.
Consumers need to take precautions when shopping online, said Doug Johnson, vice president of risk-management policy for the American Bankers Association, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. “We encourage customers to look at their accounts quite often and immediately alert your bank” if anything suspicious occurs.
He suggests doing basic research on a company before buying from it. It’s something he acknowledged he failed to do once while shopping for a Christmas present.
“I was on a website making those standard, last-minute purchases and I saw a site I wasn’t familiar with but I liked the product they had,” he said. “But I thought I’d take a chance. I clicked on it. As soon as I did, my phone rang and it was my bank.”
Johnson confirmed he had made the purchase. But he learned that the business had enacted a secondary purchase that involved a monthly fee. Johnson had the bank cancel both transactions.
He received the call as quickly as he did because previous bank customers had complained about the site and it was logged into the bank’s automated alert system.
Sometimes, consumers get more than they bargain for because they fail to read fine print. Other times, it’s a case of fraud. Johnson said financial institutions are stopping much more illegal activity.
“For every dollar of fraud which does occur against a depositor, we’re able to stop $10. That’s $1 to $10. It was $1 to $1 back in the late 1990s.”
At American Express, every transaction goes through fraud screening before it is processed, said Amelia Woltering, director of corporate affairs and communications.
Card members can sign up for free fraud alerts that will notify them of any online transaction made on their account, Woltering said.
Obtaining such alerts are just one way for consumers to protect themselves. Fair of the FTC said, “It’s gotten safer for consumers who practice safe shopping, shall we say. There are a couple easy steps for consumers” to take to be confident on purchases online.
Her advice includes:
Buy from a company whose products and customer support you already know in the brick-and-mortar world. “Consumers are usually pretty safe ordering online from those companies,” Fair said.
Search the name of unfamiliar companies on the Internet. “Put in the company name and words like complaint, scam, review, and find out what other customers have to say,” Fair said.
It’s not a foolproof method, she added, but you might come across messages posted by other consumers. It’s a good way to evaluate the possibility of fraud, she said.
Many consumers wonder whether it’s safe to give a credit-card number for online purchases. “Strangely enough, it may be safer to use a credit card than to use checks or money orders or wiring money,” Fair said. Many credit cards offer fraud protection. “Nobody is suggesting people ought to rack up credit-card debt unnecessarily, but this is one area where credit cards can be safer for people to use.”
Another note of caution: When buying online, check out the URL. If it says https: — not just http: — it’s designed to be a secure communication over a computer network.
“Is it 100 percent foolproof? No,” Fair said. “But it shows that companies have taken steps to make it harder for hackers or scammers to intercept transmission of credit-card numbers.”