Guides

Practical answers to the questions people actually ask before buying from a store they do not recognise. Where a guide makes a claim about what stores typically do, it is measured against the 10,502 stores we hold checks for rather than asserted.

• How to check if a website is real before you buy

  The padlock, the returns policy and the domain age barely discriminate — we measured all three across the corpus. Here is what separates one store from another instead.

• What to do if you bought from a scam website

  Dispute rights run on deadlines, some counted from the order date. What your payment method actually allows, and where to report it.

Related

The underlying data studies live in Research. Our checking method, and what we deliberately do not claim, is on the about page.