Shopping Pals Earn a stellar ranking and watch customers come back for more.

E-tailing: It's a brave, new world-one where companies you've never heard of fight for your trade. Who do you trust? Find answers at a growing number of Web sites that aim to guide cybershoppers through this wilderness. For you, this has double meaning-both as a consumer and a merchant. Perplexed consumers, swamped with headlines about fraud on the Internet, want guidance about where to shop. And as an e-tailer, you want to be rated highly.

So where do cybershoppers find guidance? A handful of sites have broken through to win visibility, and leading the pack is Gomez Advisors, which ranks everything from cyberdrugstores to florists. Log in here and, with a fast glance, see exactly who the category leaders are.

Gomez hardly owns this niche, however. Strong competition comes from Forrester Research with its PowerRankings. They cover much the same turf as Gomez, and are a good second opinion.