Trust, But Verify

Orders should ship in 24 hours or be free. You must check references. And visit before you sign on. "They showed me how the orders get processed through from the receiving dock to storage and all the way to packing," says Steve Newman, founder of six-person, $1 million e-commerce site Rock.com, who visited the Olean (N.Y.) warehouse of Webgistix. "It looked like they had their act together." So far, Newman has had less than one problem per 1,000 orders. "If we wanted to do this ourselves, look professional, and have a good turnaround time, we were looking at an investment of several million dollars," Newman says. "This was a fairly easy decision."