On the European Consumer Centre’s website we have launched an interactive shopping assistant called Howard. Howard makes it easy for you to do a quick check of some important information about the seller before you go shopping.
Howard is developed by the European Consumer Centre to help you:
- Avoid fraudulent websites.
- Find serious net shops.
- Get good advice on e-commerce.
- Acquire knowledge of your rights when shopping on the Internet.
Howard is simple to use. All you have to do after having activated Howard is to type in the name of the website you wish to check and you are already going.
If you also type in the country in which the seller is resident and possibly the company’s registration number (both should appear from the seller’s website) you can obtain additional information about the seller.
If you are in doubt as to how to use Howard or what the individual pieces of information mean, just click on the built-in help facility, and it will hopefully give you the answer.
What information can Howard provide you with?
All you have to do is to type in the name and home country of the website and you will get a complete overview giving, among other things, information about when the website was established, a Google search on the name of the shop, an overview of the trust-mark schemes that apply in the country concerned and information about whether the website is affiliated with these, and, in some cases, information about whether the seller is registered in the national business register. Additionally, Howard can inform you of other users’ opinion about the specific website.
Using Howard you can gather, in one process, some of the things you ought to examine while at the same time getting information about your rights.