Online Shoppers More Confident In Web Buying

[mandy]

A large majority of online U.S. shoppers have some level of confidence that their security software protects them on the Web, a study released Thursday showed.

More than two out of three online adults surveyed by Harris Interactive reported that security concerns did not curtail their Web shopping, and 38 percent said they spent more online this year than last...

Some consumers, however, were fearful of shopping on the Web. Fully 30 percent said security fears had made them shop less online or not at all during the last holiday season...

Despite the confidence in some areas, other security problems had consumers more worried. Fully 72 percent felt less than very or extremely confident about preventing their personal information from being sold to a third party....

full article: http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/1758040...0CJUMEKJVN

[bargainbloodhound]

Fully 72 percent felt less than very or extremely confident about preventing their personal information from being sold to a third party....

I wonder if the lack of privacy policies on many stores contributes to that high figure, or the complete lack of contact info (and use of user IDs rather than business names) when buying on auction sites? 

Fully 90 percent said they were either "extremely confident," "very confident," or "somewhat confident" of their protection....credit-card fraud, 91 percent about identity theft

Those numbers are good at least.

I was surprised that 90% said they shopped online at home and only 26% shopped at work. 

The 30% who said they shopped online less this year due to security fears isn't a good sign though.

[dnc_ont]

(and use of user IDs rather than business names) when buying on auction sites?

When I first went to check out eBay almost 2 years ago, when I went to sign up my first thought was "What kind of boinktard business hides behing aliases?!  They want me to send my money to people and I'm not even going to know what their name is?  Are they fucking nuts???!"

Almost said screw this, and dropped the idea of buying on eBay.

The ONLY thing that made me come to reason (? debatable, that) was that I figured if all these millions of people are doing it too, it can't be a TOTAL scam...

[bargainbloodhound]

When I first went to check out eBay almost 2 years ago, when I went to sign up my first thought was "What kind of boinktard business hides behing aliases?!  They want me to send my money to people and I'm not even going to know what their name is?  Are they boinking nuts???!"

I think if more buyers realized that eBay doesn't really verify the identity of the real person/business behind the seller's screen name that many more buyers would think twice about buying.