Occasionally when you enter a page which should be secure (such as the Checkout), you may find the padlock which your browser uses to show security state, is missing. This however, does not mean that the page is actually insecure - indeed our system automatically switches to secure mode when you hit such pages.
SO HOW CAN I TELL IF THE PAGE IS SECURE?
There are 2 ways you can use to be absolutely sure a page is secure:
1. The page address (URL) should start with https:// - note the 's' after the http). Communicating with a page which starts with https means you are using something called the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) so all information you transmit from your browser to the site is scrambled / encrypted so it can't be read by anyone else.
2. As a final check you can look at the properties for the page by clicking on the 'File' menu option in your browser. This will present you with an information panel which gives you various bits of data but the most important of these for this exercise is the bit marked 'Connection' and it should look something like this:
This tells you the page you are talking to is indeed using a secure channel and so you are safe. If the page is not secure, this will say something like: 'Not Encrypted' in which case you should never enter details you want kept private (such as Credit Card data).
If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, then there is also a button marked 'Certificates' and if you click that you will be able to confirm that the security certificate (used for scrambling the data) is indeed registered to the correct site and is valid.