There are many reasons why you may want to make purchases online in complete anonymity. Perhaps you’re participating in a Secret Santa game and need to protect your purchase from the sneaky eyes of your intended recipient. You may also want to conceal your payment for this gift if the recipient lives with you and has access to your bank or credit card statement. Or maybe your purchases are private or intimate, and you’d prefer for your household not to see them. You may live in a large apartment building with many units and want to keep your purchases out of sight from your nosy neighbors.
Whatever your reasoning for wanting to keep your online purchases anonymous or private, there are steps you can take to ensure your buys stay hidden from others.
Protect Your Form of Payment from Getting Compromised
If you are concerned about your method of payment being compromised due to hackers or low internet security, you may want to utilize a technique other than directly entering your credit card information onto a website. You may want to create and use a PayPal account so that money comes from your bank account, rather than entering any long credit card numbers. As a bonus, purchases made this way will not show any specifics on your bank statement later on. So, if you share a bank account with a partner and want to purchase them something as a surprise, they will only see an amount billed to PayPal — not a specific store or service. For instance, rather than seeing that you spent $50 at an online luxury liquor store, they will see a $50 charge to PayPal. This way, you can surprise your partner with a nice red wine or white wine and keep the purchase a complete secret.
Keep Your Online Orders Out of View
When you want to complete an online order anonymously, then you have to worry whether or not your order will be shipped to your home discretely. While some companies may have a privacy policy that prevents them from stating which business has sent the package, many more companies include their names on the return address label, making it easy to guess what someone has purchased. If you want to keep these orders private, consider using ShipAnon, a service that respects your online shopping privacy by sending your purchases to an alternate location that is not your home. Whether you set it up for a retail location or a locker, you can go pick up your purchase on your own time and maintain anonymity. You’ll be protected from the eyes of nosy neighbors, children, and others. ShipAnon gives you the flexibility to continue to shop in privacy for everything you need.
Utilize Alternate Methods to Receive Your Order
If the packaging and shipping of items proves to be a big issue for you when it comes to privacy but you want to avoid other store customers because of a COVID-19 update in your area, then you may want to utilize an alternative method of shopping. Many United States businesses now let you select a curbside pickup option so that you can avoid the crowded store and still get your items in a timely fashion. Just remember to don a face covering to mitigate the spread of germs among others completing their curbside pickup orders, as this is often a shopping technique employed by more high-risk customers such as the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions. This curbside pickup method may be especially advantageous for items like those from the liquor store, as the shipment of alcoholic beverages typically requires that someone over 21 years old accept for and sign for the package.
