In the United States, approximately 220 million people will buy something online by the end of the year 2023. This might seem like a small number, but every year since the invention of online shopping, there has been an annual increase of about 2% in the number of online shoppers.
Among these 220 million online shoppers, a sizable amount are teenagers and kids that have the ability to buy from platforms. such as Amazon or Walmart, rather than going to a store and buying products there. Due to this sizable chunk being teenagers, it's necessary for these teens to know how to shop safely online.
The first method of buying products online is through online shopping apps. These include apps such as Paypal and Venmo. Now, these are apps that are utilized by adults on a regular basis meaning that they are really trusted by most adults. However, with kids it's a completely different story. Each year the number of parents who are trusting their kids with online payment apps such as these is increasing meaning that the number of kids that are using these apps are also increasing. In order for teens to safely utilize these apps, it's critical for parents and other adults to just sit down with them and do a walkthrough of how kids can use these apps to pay for services and products that they buy on websites, in order to make sure that the teen fully understands how to use them before actually being allowed to use them on their own.
The second method of buying products online is through 3rd party websites - that might or might not be scam websites depending on the website itself. There are multiple 3rd party websites that can be found on search engines - such as Google and Bing - if you just search for the product you want to buy online. These websites claim to be selling the product that you want to buy for a much cheaper price than it is actually available on the market for. The golden rule to follow here is “if its too good to be true then its not true” because if the price for the item looks extremely low compared to the company’s official website then the website is more than likely a scam. In order to prevent teens from being phished by these scam websites with their bright colors and out of the world prices, parents and teenagers themselves should research the 3rd party website before buying/ordering anything from it. This research should consist of the experience of previous buyers with the website as well as what the website’s trust score actually is compared to some legitimate retailers.
The final method of buying products online is through gift-cards and promotional codes. These gift-cards and promotional codes are usually available to people who have either purchased the gift-card itself or have purchased from the website/company in the past. The 2nd method of purchasing items from companies in the past is how teenagers become unsafe while shopping online. A lot of teenagers become targets for scammers through mass emailing of promotional codes. These codes aren’t ones that actually work but are rather a way for scammers to get teenagers to click on these emails. This is a tactic known as phishing. In order to prevent teenagers from being victims to these scams in their emails, parents should talk with their teenagers about the different type of spam emails that they might receive as they get older. Another trick is to setup their emails in a way that already sends emails to scam if the sender is either spamming the inbox of the recipient or is known/flagged in the past for sending scam emails.
Overall, there are a lot of methods to prevent teens from falling prey to the dangers of online shopping but the best method is for the parents to teach their teens these methods as soon as they believe that they are old enough to let the teens shop online alone.
Sources
