Credibility Hounds

Consumer Reports has branched out onto the web and formed Consumer Webwatch with the help of the Pew Charitable Trust and others to help build credibility for online shopping. The site is new but it has a long list of resources if you get the short end of an online purchase as well as an interesting report: A Matter of Trust: What Users Want From Web Sites. Particularly interesting is the ranking of trust for a list of various institutions as it surprised me how even non-profits rank pretty high on the scale of distrust.