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" The perks of online shopping are obvious \u2014 no slick roads, long register lines, or parking nightmares \u2014 but you have to be careful. In your haste to click &amp;quot;complete order&amp;quot; you can overpay or get stuck with the wrong stuff. Here&amp;#039;s how to be a smart and safe shopper. Save Big Do online research to find the best-performing products. Goodhousekeeping.com is the go-to site for the Good Housekeeping Research Institute&amp;#039;s reviews. Looking for electronics? Try the brand-new reviewed.com, which rates camcorders, digital cameras, printers, and cell phones, and the excellent old standby cnet.com, especially for computers. Use comparison-shopping Websites to snag great deals. These online pages price products from all over the Web. Pronto.com is especially comprehensive, with 70 million items from 65,000 online stores. It can call up a list of, say, 4,975 blenders that you can then narrow down by price, brand, and desired features. Shopping.com has really helpful consumer reviews. Thefind.com tracks the top-selling online styles and brands. Search for Web-wide discounts and coupon codes. Stop at fatwallet.com for up to 50 percent off sites ranging from ones for the Apple Store to Banana Republic. Discountcodes.com constantly updates the latest coupon codes to enter on the checkout screen at hundreds of e-stores. And if you&amp;#039;re fishing for fashion, visit reesycakes.com, which has 600 coupon codes for merchants like Bergdorf Goodman, J.Crew, and Scoop NYC. Hold out if you can.  The trick is to wait as long as possible for the lowest prices \u2014 but to avoid missing an item you really want or ordering so late that the rush-shipping cost cancels any savings. (And be sure to check a site&amp;#039;s holiday-shipping cutoff dates: One year, I took advantage of an e-mail offer and ordered our daughter Holiday Barbie from walmart.com. But we were traveling for Christmas, and Barbie hadn&amp;#039;t arrived before we left. In a panic, I found the doll at a store and bought it.) Try to get a refund if the present sells for less after you buy it. Sign up at priceprotectr.com, and if the cost of your product drops anytime during the price-protection period after you buy from one of its 46 listed sites, you will receive an e-mail explaining exactly how to get a refund for the item. In a recent Good Housekeeping test of five hypothetical purchases, PriceProtectr e-mailed us three price drops \u2014 from $5 to $85 \u2014 within a single week. Stay Safe Shop securely. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t use public computers in airport lounges or libraries to shop online; people may be able to intercept your credit card information there,&amp;quot; says Carol Carpenter, vice president of consumer marketing for Trend Micro Internet Security, maker of PC-cillin software ($50 a year; trendmicro.com). From home, window-shop online at sites you know, or call the phone number at an unfamiliar one to make sure it&amp;#039;s legit. Order with a credit (not debit) card. That way, if you do get swindled, you will only be out a maximum of $50, by law. And don&amp;#039;t store your credit card numbers on your computer, where they&amp;#039;re vulnerable to cyber-hijacking. Look for the lock. A little padlock icon at the bottom right of the Website&amp;#039;s sign-in screen (where you enter your password) and on the checkout screen (where you type in your credit card information) means the site has a secure connection. So it&amp;#039;s less likely to be hacked or intercepted. If you see an &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; after the &amp;quot;http&amp;quot; in the Web browser once you&amp;#039;re on the page to place an order, that also indicates that the site has a secure connection. If you don&amp;#039;t see either the padlock or the &amp;quot;s,&amp;quot; it&amp;#039;s a good idea to do your shopping elsewhere. Happy Returns Check to see if the site pays shipping charges for returns.  Few of them do; that&amp;#039;s why many shoe lovers adore zappos.com, which pays for return shipping. Nordstrom.com has a reasonable $5 flat shipping fee both ways; if you exchange something rather than return it for a refund, reverse postage is free. JCPenney, Kmart, and many other retailers let you take back to their stores unwanted items you bought on their sites. But isn&amp;#039;t going to the mall what you were avoiding? Return unwanted items quickly. Many sites give you just 30 days from the invoice date to return something for a refund. That can be tricky, because if you shop too far ahead and someone doesn&amp;#039;t like your present on Christmas morning, you&amp;#039;re stuck. When in doubt, order close enough to the holiday so your gift falls within the return window. Save the packaging \u2014 or beg. At first blush, I loved the pair of designer Keds I recently ordered online. But as my husband and daughter hinted, they did look kind of odd in my size (11). Trouble was, I had thrown out the shoebox lid before checking the return policy&amp;#039;s fine print, which stated that the sneaks had to be sent back in the original packaging. So that meant making a phone call and suffering some aggravation. Fortunately, the phone rep said I could return the sneakers sans lid. I won&amp;#039;t make that mistake again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/money/advice/a17539/online-holiday-gift-shopping/>