Are there different ways to pay?
Most stores offer several ways to order, but only the larger, more
professional stores offer four or five methods.
If you prefer the familiar, you can still pay using the
old-fashioned ways:
• Calling an 800 number and placing an order, using your credit
card over the phone (just as fast as it has always been, with shipments going
out within a day or two, usually)
• Taking the information about the product, writing a letter,
slipping a check or money order into the envelope, and sending it to the
store’s snail mail address (delaying the date of shipment by a week or two)
• Cutting a purchase order and sending it in by mail (again,
causing a delay of a few weeks as they verify credit and set up a formal
account)
If you want to order electronically, there are several ways to do
that:
• Going to a secure server, filling out the form with your credit
card info, and submitting it
• Printing out the form, filling it in, and faxing it to the store
(causing a slight delay, perhaps a day or so, as they verify the credit card by
phone)
• Emailing the form to the store with your credit card information
(the least secure method, and not recommended)
Of all these methods, we recommend ordering online, as long as you
are dealing with a reputable store that has a secure server. The very worst is
email. By mistake, you can send your credit card information to your department
list at work, or the people on that newsgroup you’ve been following. Uh-oh!
What exactly does the Buy button commit
me to?
Nothing. So far. Clicking a button like Buy, Order, or Place in
Shopping Cart just starts the purchase, placing an item in your imaginary
shopping cart. Glitch: Sometimes you have to enter a quantity into the slot
next to the Buy button, or else you get rejected because the stupid system
thinks you have not asked to buy anything, because you did not select the zero
under Quantity and change it to one. (Why do programmers set the quantity to
zero? Do they really think someone will eagerly order zero units of the
product?)
Generally, you wait a moment, and then you see information about
the product you are proposing to buy. Often, this information is displayed in
what is known as your shopping cart, or shopping bag, which contains everything
you have thought you might buy so far. The shopping cart just lets you make a
pile of items you might buy, without ordering any of them yet. You just get to
see your order so far, with information like this about each item:
• The product name
• The product number
• The price
• The quantity
• The extended price (price times quantity)
• Perhaps the shipping costs for this item
You have not committed to anything yet. You are just staring at
your cart full of items as you rest in the aisle of the online store.
What is this shopping cart thing?
The shopping cart (or shopping bag, or whatnot) is the mechanism
by which the store keeps track of your order, as if you were putting items into
a cart at the supermarket. The idea is that you don’t have to actually pay when
you drop items into the cart, and you can remove them, change quantities, and
so on before you go to checkout. In some stores you can edit the order
directly, and in other stores, you have to click a button named Modify Cart, or
something like that. To remove an item, just revise the quantity to read zero.
In some stores, you can choose shipping methods at this time.
Other stores just ship by ground, so you don’t get a choice.
In a well-designed site, you can view your order or shopping cart
at any time. In a lousy site you have to pretend to buy something to see what
you already have in the cart.
As in a real store, when you have finally decided what you want to
buy, you wheel your cart by the checkout counter.
In many stores, this is the time you have to enter your credit
card info, or confirm the info you gave when you registered, which now shows up
again (except for your password). For instance, your billing and shipping
addresses appear all filled in, but you can change them now, although many
stores insist that your shipping and billing addresses match the address to
which the credit card company sends its bills. You also get one last chance to
edit quantities and remove products. Pay particular attention to the shipping
method to make sure that is really what you want. (In some systems, you must
wait until checkout to pick a shipping method, and find out how much it will
cost only during checkout. Ugh.)
When everything is the way you like it, click Submit or Order to
send your order in. In a well-designed site, you should immediately get a page
confirming the order details and asking you, one more time, to confirm that
this is really, really what you want. One more OK, and the order is really,
really sent in. (Poorly designed or greedy sites just accept your order the
first time, not giving you a moment to reconsider.)
In a few minutes an email should go out from the site confirming
the purchase. (You may get the confirmation in a quarter hour, or a few hours,
depending in part on the traffic on the Internet and the speed with which your
email is delivered.) Be sure to save this confirming email, in case anything
goes wrong with the order. You might even consider setting up a folder to save
mail from stores so you can find it quickly.
What is this express checkout or
1-Click purchase?
This is a neat way to buy with one click of your mouse. You have
to sign up for this privilege, giving your address, preferred shipping method,
and credit card number ahead of time. Because the store has all that
information on file, and you agree that they should use it whenever you click
the Express or 1-Click button, you can now go browsing away, and whenever you
feel the impulse, click that button. That’s all you have to do. They confirm
that you have ordered such and such, and in a few days it arrives.
Of course, this method is so easy that you may find you order
unnecessary or impulse items. We certainly do.
Why do I need a billing address?
Your billing address helps the credit card company confirm that
you are who you say you are.
Most stores will reject your order if the credit card number is
wrong, or if your address does not match the address the credit card sends its
bills to.
At most stores, then, you must enter a billing address, and for
many that must also be the shipping address, so they can be sure you are not a
criminal who has stolen a card and wants stuff sent direct to a motel room.
Sites specifically set up for gifts do allow you to have the
present sent directly to the recipient, but that is unusual.
How safe is my credit card information
with an online store?
Your credit card information is safer online than at your local
gas station, convenience store, or restaurant—at least if the online store uses
a secure server for your order. A secure server is a computer that uses
software that protects your personal and credit card information.
Just make sure that you have gone to a secure site before you hand
over credit card info. How can you tell? Well, every time you leave a
"nonsecure" area and go to the "secure" site, you are
notified with a little pop-up window, saying, "You are about to view pages
over a secure connection" (unless you have told your browser to stop
showing you this little message). Although this alert sounds like a warning, it
is actually a reassuring signal that your transaction will, in fact, be
private. Other good signs: the address line changes from http to https, meaning you are using a
secure site. Also, in Internet Explorer you see an icon of a lock in the status
bar at the bottom of the screen; or in Netscape Navigator, you get a bright
yellow key on a blue background at the bottom of the screen. You may also see
the letters SSL, which stand for Secure Sockets Layer (a set of standards for
plugging in to the secure server), or SET, which stands for Secured Electronic
Transaction. You should also see the address change from http to https, for
secure, and an icon of a key or lock appears in your status bar.
Techie note: The Secure Sockets Layer, developed by Netscape,
authenticates you to the store, and vice versa, and scrambles your messages
back and forth so anyone who tapped into them could not figure them out. This
encoding is called encryption,
like what governments use to hide their messages from prying eyes. Good
encryption means that it would take a team of programmers months or years,
using a supercomputer, to figure out that you were ordering a hair dryer.
The purpose of encryption is simply to keep messages private and
whole, so they cannot be read by outsiders and cannot be tampered with en
route.
Encryption takes your order and turns it into a secret code so
that only the intended recipient (you or the store) can read it after mutual
authentication—that is, confirmation that the store is who they say they are,
and that you are who you say you are.
How does encryption work?
That computer, the secure server, has two secret codes, called
keys.
One is a public key: a big complicated number sent to you, which
is embedded in your messages back to the site, which is itself coded, or
"encrypted," which is just a fancy word for "made secret by
turning it into code."
The other is the private key, for you alone, which is what the
site uses to match up with the public key, to authenticate that this message
comes from you. When the keys match, the system can unlock the code to
translate your scrambled information.
Techie note: The private key is the prime factors of the public
key. Thus, if the public key were 45, the private key would be 5 and 9, the
factors that multiplied together make 45.
Once all these keys match up, the server translates your order and
sends it to the accounting or ordering system. No human gets to read your
credit card number during this, and there are no paper receipts lying around
for vicious jerks to steal. That’s why this process is, ultimately, a lot safer
for you than giving your card to the clerk down at the dry-cleaning store.
Which credit cards do stores take?
Almost every online store takes both MasterCard and Visa. Many
also take American Express and Discover.
At the end of checkout, you are asked whether you want to submit
the order or clear the form. Submitting the order just means sending the order
in officially, committing yourself to the purchase.
Generally, the system digests the order, checks with your credit
card company, checks product availability, then comes back with a confirmation
showing what you ordered, where it will be sent, and oh yes, what the order ID
or confirmation number is.
Save this number.
If possible, print this confirmation page or save it on your hard
disk, because this number is what you need to use to track your order or cancel.