Spot a fake shopping site with these 3 steps

Like every other thing, online shopping comes with its set of advantages and disadvantages.  There are a lot of legit online platforms on which you can perform different marketing transactions. Likewise, several fake websites are posing as authentic.  These fake websites are there to attract intending customers and inevitably defraud them.

Transactions on a fake website could lead to different things for you. It could result in your details being stolen from you. This is a major part of most customer’s complaints. This is possible with details supplied on the website during your supposed transactions. It could also lead to your phone becoming corrupt or damaged.  This is a result of a new malware introduced to your phone from this fake website. 

However, there are spot-on ways through which you could easily identify that a website is fake. Some of these are; 

The domain name

This is one of the easiest ways through which you can quickly identify a fake website in the eCommerce industry. These fake websites tend to mimic the names of popular shopping sites so they can easily direct traffic to the site without the knowledge of the customers. 

For instance, a mimic of popular sites such as Amazon would have the domain name as Amaz0n rather than the correct spelling. It takes extra vigilance on your side for you to figure out little differences like this. So you have to double-check every web domain name before committing to business with them, especially for sites you were redirected to. 

Another means by which you can figure out fake shopping stores with the business name is by checking how many names the business has had so far. This is even possible for businesses that use social media platforms as their online platform. 

 A genuine business would have no reason to change its business names at specific times. However, these fake stores tend to change their domain sites a lot in a bid to attract different customers at different seasons of the year. 

The domain age

As irrelevant as this may seem, it is a very true means of validating how real a business is. Some of these scammers are aware of the period when customers tend to buy more such as holiday times. They then quickly set up a fast make-believe business site around that time. There are different tools available for users to check up on the age of a domain.  

Look out for errors 

Due to the illegitimacy of the business, chances are that these fake sites would not take time to double-check the outlook of their sites. Legit professional sites are very intentional about the professional outlook of their businesses. As such they do not mind paying people who are in the business of double-checking for these. 

This is not the same for fake sites which are mostly put up in a haste depending on the season. As such, errors such as misspellings, grammar mistakes, wrong capitalization are quickly noticed on these sites. 

It is not unlikely for legit websites to have one or 2 errors but if a site has a lot of odd errors associated with it, you should take a closer look at it.