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There are a lot of interesting things people buy online but even from the beginning there were a lot of disappointed customers. But the internet can be compared with the real life : there are a lot of scammers and the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to start thinking a bit before you rush into buying something.

Let’s learn by example: How to buy an mp3 player

First you should decide what brand would you like. Even this step is not necessary because on Bizrate you can do a generic search like this:

I decided to buy a San Disk brand. My friends told me this is an excellent manufacturer with a reasonable price range. So we click on San Disk brand in the left panel. I will be very cheap today so let’s see what they have to offer for under 60$. You can be very specific, so I would choose a memory capacity between 1-5 Giga.  SanDisk Sansa M230 1 GB MP3 Player looks like a reasonable choice but let’s start the process again with this specific mp3 player in mind. We have a price range between 40-70$ and the product can be found in 6 stores.

A new window with the shops it’s displayed and now comes the tricky part.

You should take this into consideration:

-          Does the shop deliver at your address

-          Does the shop have ratings ( if you see a green smile and a big number of reviews then you are on to something )

-          Next  check the price

-          Another important thing to do is check the page rank of the site with the Google toolbar

-          An important details is the price they take to deliver the goods ( if you are in USA then you should must  search for  a 0 fee)

-          The mail in rebate is another trick. Only if you are in USA you can take full advantage of this discount.   An ordinary mail with a check will be send to your address after a few months getting your rebate back. ( They probably think after a few months their product will have the same price without the actual rebate so they are selling in advance )

-          Try to find out their return policy.

Mwave.com has a Page Rank of 3 and this is reasonable. Don’t ever buy from a store with a Page Rank value smaller then 2.  (The Page Rank is the importance Google gives to a site so this is defiantly a factor because a high page rank will reflect: quality and great support )