When customers plan their purchase, they will find that shopping online will save them money. Internet catalogs allow customers to shop 24 hours and to have products delivered to their door. The fast paced technology environment in which we live and rising prices leave very little time for driving around in a car shopping from one store to the other using gas to find the best price. A Nielson January 2008 press release states, "More than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase-increasing the market for online shopping by 40 percent in the past two years-according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits." The Nielsen Global Survey referenced a total of 875 million internet shoppers.

Never initiate any online shopping by responding to a spam email message. Bottom line: legitimate online retailers don't send out unsolicited mail. Besides, if you respond to a spam email message, you are supporting the spammers, and you don't want to do that!

If you want to purchase an item from a website, but you're not 100% confident about the site's trustworthiness, then search Yahoo!, MSN and Google to see if you can find any reports of security issues, bad conduct or poor customers support.

Should you be nervous about submitting your credit card information over the Internet? No, you shouldn't. Just remember to use common sense and observe best practices before whipping out that credit card.