How to shop online safely in Germany

Who wouldn’t want to immediately benefit from an attractive special offer? But sometimes you’re caught with crooks. We’ll tell you how you can check the reliability of your providers – despite all the basic data protection regulations.

If you order often on the internet and don’t just use smart stores like Amazon or Alternate, you will have doubts from time to time when it comes to particularly tempting bargains about the fact that everything is going well. And the fear of reaching a dubious store is justified.

Basic rules of conduct: check the information carefully

There is nothing more tempting than making a great bargain: you want to have a certain product, but you are discouraged by the price and you should save a lot of time – a cheaper model would do the same. But then you will find exactly the product you want at an unbeatable price. For example, if you want to buy a product safely, you can turn to trusted stores, such as Sparhandy television.

Here are the most important store seals:

• Trusted stores: The fee-approved seal of approval from the company of the same name in Cologne is awarded to stores that meet certain criteria in terms of data protection and Security, Meet the cost and price, payment, delivery, returns, and customer service.
• S @ fer-Shopping: This fee-based seal is issued by TÜV Süd. It is based on a strict three-step testing system, consisting of an on-site audit, in which the organizational framework, Data Security, verifies data protection and order processing, questions and complaints, an expert online assessment of the store in terms of concerns the structure of the page, the concept of navigation and customer information and finally an online verification of the server, which aims to determine the technical security of the store.
• Tested online store: Behind the paid certificate is the EHI Retail Institute, stores based on 200 criteria – including existing legal texts (terms and conditions, data protection statement, etc.).

If a store does not have such an award, you can get a first impression of its seriousness by calling the fingerprint. Did the operator give a trade register number? Can you find your name and address? Then call the service area and look at the warranty and the conditions of return or cancellation. Is the information understood and intelligible? If so, the store is probably reliable.

Amazon, eBay & Co .: Evaluate retailers on shopping platforms

In addition to the general criteria mentioned, which you can use to evaluate the seriousness of an online store, there are also various ways to obtain information about certain stores.

This is especially easy with shopping platforms like Amazon Marketplace or eBay. With both, you can see the quality of a store based on customer ratings.

In the case of bad reviews, you should find out the reasons for this, as you may not agree with the criticism. For example, very careful packaging may seem unmatched to some people as waste production, while others see it as an absolute necessity.