With just a click of the mouse, shoppers can buy nearly any product online — from groceries to cars, from insurance policies to home loans. The world of electronic commerce, also known as e-commerce, enables consumers to shop at thousands of online stores and pay for their purchases without leaving the comfort of home. For many, the Internet has taken the place of Saturday afternoon window shopping at the mall. Consumers expect merchants to not only make their products available on the Web, but to make payments a simple and secure process. However, the same things can go wrong shopping in cyberspace as in the real world. Sometimes it is simply a case of a computer glitch or poor customer service. Other times, shoppers are cheated by clever scam artists.

An April 2004 survey by AC Nielsen found that the top security concerns of America’s online shoppers were:

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics says Indiana lost 16,500 jobs in July. That was more than any other state except Florida and Georgia, and the six-tenths of a percent loss in jobs was the second highest in the nation. Indiana economic development chief Nate Feltman blames high oil prices for job losses in the auto and recreational vehicle industries, but he says the state has recruited thousands of promised jobs that haven’t come on line yet. The federal agency says Indiana’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate reached 6.3 percent in July, up from 4.4 percent in July of 2007. It continued a steady increase in joblessness over the previous two months: The rates were 5.3 percent in May and 5.9 percent in June. Indiana’s neighbors had higher jobless rates, ranging from Michigan’s 8.5 percent to Kentucky’s 6.7 percent. The rate for the nation as a whole was 5.7 percent in July.

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