What was ShopSafely?

Who made it

According to Inc., ShopSafely came from b8ta, a San Francisco-based retailer that operated showrooms where shoppers could try consumer electronics and other gadgets. b8ta's chief executive, Vibhu Norby, told Inc. that the project began in March 2020 as an internal effort to work out best practices for the company's own 22 stores, and that b8ta published the research because it seemed useful to the public. A Baton Rouge Business Report summary of the same reporting credited Norby as ShopSafely's founder.

Wikipedia's entry on b8ta records that the company was founded in 2015, opened its first store in Palo Alto that December, and closed its last US stores on February 18, 2022.

What it rated

Inc. reported in late June 2020 that ShopSafely had reviewed 136 retail chains and graded their official COVID-19 protection policies from A to F. Each chain was measured against 14 practices, and b8ta staff checked each retailer's own website for its published policies. Reported examples of the factors included:

• mask requirements for employees and customers;
• employee temperature checks;
• limits on store traffic;
• contactless or curbside pickup and contactless payment;
• sanitizing items after they had been tried on;
• plexiglass shields at checkout.

The grades rated published policies, not inspections of individual stores. A banking-industry newsletter in August 2020 noted the site covered retailers only, not other kinds of businesses.

Reported grades

Retailers referred to the grades themselves. Kohl's, in its announcement of 5 a.m. Black Friday opening hours for November 27, 2020, said it had received an "A" grade from ShopSafely and linked to this domain.

Where Yelp fits

ShopSafely is sometimes mentioned alongside Yelp because the same news coverage discussed both. The Inc. article that introduced ShopSafely was mainly about a separate Yelp feature that let businesses show their safety measures — such as social distancing, staff masks, hand sanitizer and contactless payment — on their Yelp pages. The coverage presents these as two different efforts; it does not describe ShopSafely as a Yelp product.

If you followed an old link

Older news articles and retailer announcements from 2020 still point to this address. The grades they mention reflected each chain's published policies at that time, during the pandemic, and are not maintained anywhere on this site. For a retailer's current policies, check its own website.

Why it mattered

The 2020 coverage made a point that still applies: shoppers decide where to spend partly on how clearly a business explains its policies. Norby advised retailers to keep safety information centralized on their own website rather than scattered across blog posts. Today the questions shoppers ask are more often about scams, returns and honest pricing — the topics the rest of this guide covers, starting with how to spot a fake online store.