Q.7 Look in detail at the terms and conditions for purchasing from your site. Are they reasonable? Comment on anything unusual or unreasonable that you find. What about returning goods? Describe the main mechanisms of support provided by your site. Do you think that it is better or worse than the competition? Explain your answer.

From the website I could not find a particular section on terms and conditions about buying online. The only condition I could find was that Aeropostale were only able to accept credit cards from US or Canadian banks and could therefore only ship to USA or Canada. I find this unreasonable as if customers are willing to pay the tax for the goods they should be able to purchase them.

For returning an item the process is straight forward with customers using the information given to them when they received their package. This is done by packaging the parcel up again and sending it with their details and the information needed for the company such as the packing slip. This will allow customers to obtain a full refund for their order and they are given 30days to return the item.

Q.8 Examine the registration process for your site, from the perspective of security. Is your data encrypted? What does this mean?

To register for the site customers have to enter in their email address then decide on a password and confirm it. This is a simple registration process although I would not be convinced on the security of the details. In order to add extra security customers should be able to add in a secret question which they can enter when they are logging into the site.  The data entered is then shared around the company and other details such as their IP address, browser information and reference site domain name every time the user visits the Web Site. We also collect information regarding customer traffic patterns and site usage.

Data encryption is a secure process for keeping your sensitive and confidential information private. It is a process by which bits of data are mathematically jumbled with a password-key. The Encryption process makes the data unreadable unless or until decrypted.

The screen shot above shows the encrypted pages are not saved. Therefore the data from the website is not encrypted.

Q.9 Does the site use cookies? Explain how cookies are used in your site.

Aeropostale does use cookies, which are files stored on the computer’s hard drive by the browser. The cookies will help the company to identify account holders and to optimize their shopping experience. Cookies also allow the company to hold selections in a shopping cart when a user leaves this Web Site without checking out, therefore when customer place an item in their shopping bag they can then return to the website to shop for more products and when they are finished return to the shopping cart and place their order. Most browsers accept cookies automatically but allow you to disable them. If customers leave cookies “turned on” companies feel they can offer a better shopping experience on their website.