That's an educated, safe call to make. There are plenty of fly-by-night operators out there that use a pretty website template they found for free to take your money, or worse, take your money and your information to then sell and disappear, never to be seen again, leaving you empty handed, and facing the authorities and your bank about the fraud you are allegedly involved in.

When you see a website with the authentic BuyerShield clickable seal on it, you can be sure this website passed our tough checks and satisfied the requirements of that seal - and we always perform a basic fraud check no matter what BuyerShield seal a website is certified for. This gives you peace of mind and the confidence to know that at the very least, the website you are dealing with is not run by scammers.

How can I tell if a website is genuinely certified by BuyerShield?

Who's running your favorite website

Did you know that most websites are run by businesses with only 1-4 employees? In many countries, small business makes up to 90% of the business economy! Most of us greatly rely on small business without realizing, especially on the Internet. Small business has a big advantage over big "trusted" business - they can adapt to economic change rapidly, change their internal structure, improve products/services quickly, provide a more personal service, and are more willing and able to work out special deals with you.

Small business is great for all - the only catch is, due to the flexibility running a small business offers - it offers unscrupulous sellers and scammers the ability to quickly setup an online storefront, steal your information and money, and quickly disappear, with only a trail of credit card chargeback's and fake names to locate them.

Any website that displays our seal(s) has passed our rigorous fraud-checks, and at least one of our security, privacy or product authentication checks, meaning they are safe to transact with.

Ensuring your buying safety

A website with a Security Verified Seal means the website has passed our brutal security checks, stopping would-be hackers dead in their tracks from stealing customer information or performing other illegal activities with the website involved. Our tests examine a number of different key areas. We look for worm holes, technical sql injection vulnerabilities and more. We go beyond the call of duty to make sure that when you hand your credit card information over, there is virtually no chance it will fall into the wrong hands. If we find vulnerabilities, we contact the seller to fix them, only after all vulnerabilities are fixed do they qualify for the Security Verified seal.

Our strict checking applies to all seals. For example, if a seller's five page privacy policy has one line mentioning customer information may be given out or simply does not mention at all if they will give out your information - the seller does not qualify for our Privacy Verified Seal until ammended. If a website offers a free newsletter subscription or a free email course and displays our clickable and authentic BuyerShield Privacy Verified seal, you can be positive they will respect your email address. If you click on our seals, you will be able to read information about the certified website. We periodically monitor all qualified websites to ensure they are conforming to our policies.