Is online shopping safe or not?

There are two parts to it. First, the system that you plan to use for online shopping has to be free of malware. If it has malware that steals data, one might end up compromising the sensitive details despite the fact that the site is well known and trusted. Keep the antivirus up-to-date and using the latest version of the browser are a few of the precautionary steps one must take to ensure the sanity of the system as far as possible.

The second part is the way websites manage the transaction details. Big giants and well-known websites might take your card details directly and process them with the banks at their own convenience. For this, they implement lots of procedures to ensure that customer details are secure with them. Apple app store and Facebook are a few examples adopting such mechanisms.

Most of the stores can not afford such an expensive infrastructure and hence opt for payment gateway transfers. As soon as you decide to pay, these websites will redirect you to payment gateways (Paypal, EBS, CCAvenue, etc.) which in turn would let you choose the bank of your choice and let the transaction proceed. This is deemed relatively a safer procedure as most of the payment gateways (some gateways have a bad reputation too) implement secure infrastructure and do not compromise with the sensitive transaction details of the customers. Serving websites do not even come into the picture while the transaction is taking place and get a notification about the success or failure based on the transaction processing that happened at payment gateways.

If you are in India, every such transaction goes through a two-step verification procedure (OTP-one time password, Verification Codes, etc.) making online shopping a safer bet.