Tip 3 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

A secure site is one which has been certified as being secured from opportunistic attempts to steal your personal information (including card numbers) as they are passed from your computer to the site. The site may have nothing to do with such an interception, so even if you trust the name with which you are dealing you should consider this quick rule.

A secure site is identified in two ways: firstly a padlock should appear in the status bar towards the base of your web browser; secondly the web address in the address bar will be proceeded with ‘https://’ rather than the standard ‘http://’ (note the lack of ’s’).

An unsecured site (like this one!) shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as bad, but you certainly should think very hard about passing your private information to one.