Secure Shopping Guarantee

When buying something on the Internet, there are three things you need to be sure of:

• The data you send will be strongly encrypted.
• The site you're doing business with is the site you think it is.
• The site you're doing business with processes your credit card and address information in a safe and responsible manner.

Points 1 and 2 are taken care of by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), the industry standard security protocol that Abt.com uses to communicate with secure browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer. When communicating with a secure server like ours, these browsers encrypt the information you send in a way that is extremely difficult for anyone else to decode. (You don't have to know whether your browser supports secure transactions - if it doesn't, you won't be able to complete the checkout process.)

Most of the activity on our site involves the viewing of materials we've prepared and made accessible to everyone, so there's no need for these pages to be "secure". With a product page, for example, no security risk exists because there is no "information" being exchanged.

The checkout and confirmation areas of Abt.com are secured using SSL encryption. This ensures that your credit card number and personal information are never sent over the Internet unencrypted. Your credit card information is immediately stored in its encrypted form in the data center. Once it is encrypted, no one except the credit card authorization company can decrypt it. Your credit card number is never displayed on our site. Only the last four digits will ever be shown. Also, your personal information, such as your address, e-mail and billing information, are stored in a secure server within the data center. Only those with proper authorization can view this data. We guarantee it.

Yes. "Cookies" are small pieces of data that your browser holds in memory or stores in a special file on your hard drive. These small pieces of data are used to help our server remember you while you browse our site from one link to the next and allow us to improve the quality of your experience when you visit our site. Cookies also allow you to place items in your shopping cart, continue browsing, and come back to check out at a later time. We do not use cookies to store any of your personal or financial information on your computer or on our servers.