Better Business Bureau offers tips to skip stress, avoid holiday shopping scams

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Better Business Bureau offers tips to skip stress, avoid holiday shopping scams

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The Better Business Bureau (BBB) this week is advising shoppers—both online and in-person—to be aware of scams and plan ahead to make the most of Black Friday shopping.

As with last year, the BBB expects more people to avoid crowds by shopping online. Some big box stores, including Target, have cut their weekend hours by closing their doors altogether on Thanksgiving Day.

Meanwhile, online retailers have been ramping up for brisk business. Many have launched early Black Friday sales.

Shoppers may find, however, that this year isn’t quite the same as holiday shopping seasons of yore.

While supply chain snags and slow-downs have decreased, they’re still a factor in the quantity and types of goods in stores. It’s also a factor in the higher prices for some of those must-have gifts.

According to a recent analysis, “the holiday shopping season is predicted to have 4.7 million packages a day

Amazon shopping, streaming, business services begin to come back after outage :: WRAL.com

Raleigh, N.C. — Holiday shoppers and web developers nationwide were stalled on Tuesday when some of Amazon’s business services, including e-commerce, web hosting and Prime Video, went offline shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector.com, which tracks connectivity issues based on customer reports.

At noon, DownDetector showed a peak of more than 25,000 reports of problems connecting to Amazon.com and 11,000 reports about outages on Amazon Web Services, which provides remote computing and cloud computing services to other businesses, including WRAL Digital. The problem was concentrated along the eastern seaboard, with Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta all showing outages.

WRAL uses Amazon Web Services, for instance, to schedule the livestreaming of regular newscasts to the WRAL News app and to download the latest news stories from the Associated Press and video from NBC. Each of those services was showing delays or was simply unavailable on

Online shopping scams flourish on social media during pandemic

A shift toward online shopping during COVID-19, a global supply chain crisis, and a resurging economy have all created a recipe for a breakneck holiday shopping season – one where online shopping fraud poses a tremendous risk to consumers. Online purchase scams have skyrocketed during the pandemic, and social media ads play a key role in the mushrooming problem, a new Better Business Bureau® (BBB ®) study finds.

The in-depth investigative study – Theft on a massive scale: Online shopping fraud and the role of social media – finds the pandemic, along with lax social commerce shopping platforms, has opened the door for scammers in China to steal from desperate online shoppers. Read the full study.

Online shopping fraud has been growing for several years, but according to BBB research, it dramatically increased during the pandemic as more people shopped online. A BBB survey found 29% of

Quick and easy ways to be an Amazon shopping ninja this year

Even if you’re not an Amazon fan, you can’t deny how easy it is to find just about anything you want. That includes, of course, holiday gifts.

This year, be an Amazon shopping ninja. Tap or click here for clever ways to hide your gift orders, get Amazon Prime for less money, trade in your older gadgets for credit, and more.

There’s also account security to consider. You should remove your Amazon public profile, for one. Tap or click for five security steps every Amazon shopper should take.

Then we get to the money. Whether you’re buying presents, getting yourself a few gifts, or doing your regular shopping, there are tricks you can use to save a pretty penny.

1. Sign up for an Amazon Business account

If you shop on Amazon a lot, you likely have a Prime account. Here are some of my favorite perks included with

Better Business Bureau warns of holiday shopping scams

GREENVILLE, N.C. (WITN) – While you’re spending money shopping on Black Friday, scammers are looking to make a profit.

“The Holidays are such a joyous time of year but they can turn sour really quickly if a scammer is able to find their way into your lives,” said Mallory Wojciechowski, president and CEO of BBB of Eastern NC. “Having a plan ahead of time and knowing how scammers operate is the best way to avoid losing money.”

The Better Business Bureau is offering the following tips to protect you and your wallets before heading to the stores or shopping online this holiday season:

Start early. Numbers indicate that online shopping is up, so starting your shopping early can help avoid running into out-of-stock or overpriced items.
Research the business ahead of time. Check their business profile on bbb.org, ask for references from friends/family, and look for reviews and/or complaints.