Can I trust a site I never heard about before for shopping?

Most of the times, online dealers get rank for how satisfy were the costumers they dealt with. Look for this rating, read reviews and criticism. If most of the reviews are O.K I reckon you can trust the dealer.

Good solution for that can be CallingID. It tells you who owns the site, where is the owner located and if it is safe dealing with this site. Unlike solutions like IE7, McAfee Site Advisor and Norton Confidential that tries to warn you from really bad guys CallingID provides a green light to do business with good sites. see their solutions at

If you are not comfortable and cannot find information on a site you never heard of then don't buy from it.

However, having said that, I am sure you haven't heard of most stores even in your neighborhood.

Read the about of the shop and you should perform a google search, include groups and news on the site name and see if anyone has complained about them.

If a site is hosted on eBay or Yahoo shops, or another large reputable shopping enabler it is likely on the up and up. Obviously this is not always the case. You need to trust your instinct and always be careful. 

In short: "Trust Your Peers". 

Here is a question that will help answer your question:

Do you ever buy on eBay? If you do, how do you decide wheter the seller is "safe" to buy from or not? Right, you check the seller's rating by other buyers. As a rule-of-thumb, a seller with positive rating higher than 90%, given by more than 50 different users, is most probably safe to buy from.

The same applies to any shopping site - check how that site is rated by other users, but make sure that the rating site you are using for rating-checks is a reliable one with large amounts of users. For that matter, some very good sources are Epinions.com, bizrate.com, yahoo shopping, CNET shopping and more.

 If you will not buy from a site just because you didn't hear about it, you may be missing out on very good deals. So find a couple of good rating sites that you trust, and then check how your potential site is rated by your peers.

Search for their name in the net specially in complaint boards.