As I write this, the national average price for a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $3.69 according to GasBuddy.com. Just running out to the mall now to look for clothes, music or even gifts for the upcoming Mother’s Day holiday.

It’s times like this that online shopping seems like a more and more tempting solution to do your shopping as so many companies offer free or reduced shipping costs. Places like Amazon.com offer Amazon Prime shipping which gives you unlimited two-day shipping for $79 a year, and with their ever expanding grocery selection, it becomes quite a tempting offer.

So if you’re out there shopping online, how can you safeguard yourself to make sure the site you are using is trustworthy?  There are a couple ways that you can tell if a site is secure, and while there won’t always be the ultimate answer, they will certainly help you to head in the right direction.

Secure Certificates – These aren’t quite as prevalent as they used to be, as most big name sites don’t feel the need to display them, but you can still find them on lots of sites.

These tell you that the site is using an encrypted Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and that your personal information is being sent via this service.  If you click on the button, you will see verification that the certificate does belong to the domain name that you are visiting, and what sort of encryption it is using.

Secure Lock Indicators – For those sites that don’t use the obvious secure certificate badges, there are other symbols you can look for that will let you know if the site is secure.  In this image to the right provided by Microsoft, you can see that you can look for the normal “http://” in a web address to change to “https://” which means that the page is secured.

You can also look for the padlock icon to change from an unlocked position to a locked one, and that tells you the information is locked.

Both of these systems will be good indicators, but you also have to decide for yourself if the site looks trustworthy.  Does the deal seem to be too good to be true?  Do you know the company from elsewhere?  Have you read reviews anywhere about them?

There are many people out there that say shopping online is totally unsafe, but in all my years on the Internet, I have never had a problem (-knockonwood-), but I try to practice to safe shopping habits as much as possible.  If you just check for the things we listed above, you will be much closer to a safer online shopping experience.