O'Reilly's study found that just 3,239 of the 648,613 Web sites it queried electronically are secure enough to be considered commerce-ready.
Substantial opportunity exists for businesses with sites that engender customer confidence.
Net , just launched a pilot program to test three logos it wants Web sites to use to indicate how carefully they guard personal data received from site visitors. It's about trusting what happens to information you give a Web site. Granted, most Web sites are marketing tools, not sales efforts. Even so, O'Reilly's finding means most companies don't understand how important trust is to selling on the Net, not just selling to consumers but to businesses, too. The biggest players in the trust game, the bank card associations Visa International and MasterCard International , are still on the sidelines.