Buying safely — the short version

Most “buy safely” pages in this category are written to alarm you. This one is not, because the genuinely useful version of the advice is short, undramatic, and applies to buying anything online.

The whole checklist

• 1
  Buy from the manufacturer's own store

  Not because everything else is sinister, but because the 90-day satisfaction guarantee and the one-year warranty are agreements with the seller. Buy elsewhere and neither applies to you at all.

• 2
  Check the connection before entering card details

  https and a padlock in the address bar. This is basic and it is still worth two seconds.

• 3
  Read the guarantee before you order, not after

  Check what remedy it actually offers — on this product it is a replacement or exchange rather than a refund — plus who pays postage and how opened consumables are handled. Four minutes, and it is the only part of the purchase genuinely within your control.

• 4
  Look for a real contact route

  An email address or form that identifies who is behind the store. A shop you cannot contact is a shop you cannot get a refund from.

• 5
  Check you are not agreeing to a recurring charge

  Read the small print immediately around the order button. Look for pre-ticked boxes, and for wording about subscriptions or automatic replenishment. This applies to every online store, everywhere.

• 6
  Confirm the total before the final screen

  Shipping and tax included, with no charges appearing only at the last step.

• 7
  Keep the order confirmation

  For the full year. It is what both a refund request and a warranty claim are assessed against.

How to read marketing in this category

You are going to encounter a lot of it. Some patterns worth recognising, none of which mean a product is bad — only that a particular claim is doing sales work rather than informing you:

• iTimers and stock counters. If it resets on reload, it is decoration. A purchase at this price does not benefit from a compressed decision.
• iPercentages without a source. “87% of users” means something quite different depending on whether it is a company satisfaction survey or a clinical endpoint. Ask which. Usually it is the former.
• iResearch cited about a technology, presented as being about a product. Studies on red light therapy in general are not studies of any particular device — a distinction we try to make explicit every time we cite one.
• iComparisons to clinical procedures. Home devices operate at a fraction of professional output. “The same as a $2,000 treatment” is a framing, not an equivalence.
• iBody-composition claims for a skin device. Fat reduction, inch loss, contouring. We make none of those claims for this product and we would treat any page that does with real scepticism.
• iDramatic before-and-after imagery. Lighting, posture and photo timing account for a great deal of what such images appear to show. This is why we suggest taking your own, under fixed conditions.

If something goes wrong

Contact the retailer first — they hold your order and they are the only party who can refund it. If you paid by card and cannot reach them, your card issuer's chargeback process exists for exactly that situation and is worth knowing about before you need it. We cannot intervene in an order, because we never had it: we are a review site, not the seller.