I have found out the hard way that it is not a good idea to buy any product or service from a website before trying to contact them first. And then you should wait until you get a satisfactory answer before making the purchase. All too many times, I have come across a website that offered something that I wanted at what I thought was a reasonable price, only to make an impulsive purchase and subsequently never get what I ordered.
Always attempt to contact the website proprietors first. If you don’t get an answer in a reasonable amount of time, move on. Think about this. If you can’t get a response from someone while you are still a potential customer, you are not likely to get a response after you have made a purchase and they have gotten your money. Yes, there are many unscrupulous website owners out there are on the Internet. As a result, you have to be careful.
But sometimes you will lose out not so much due to the dishonesty of the owner, but because they just abandoned their site, leaving everything, including the Paypal link, intact. It could be because they simply gave up on the site and moved on to something else. But the problem could be that they died or became seriously ill, with no one left to manage their site for them. You would likely be surprised by the number of derelict websites that exist in modern cyberspace.
At any rate, you should always make a practice of contacting the site owner(s) and getting an acceptable response before making any online purchase from a website that you are not familiar with. Doing so will greatly reduce the chances that you will come away empty handed.
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