The buyer can then review this estimate within the company and come back and edit it a number of times and create a new estimate. Normally, he would do it the hard way, calling different resellers, getting prices, funnelling people information for budget approval and starting all over again. On the site, it is all done instantaneously online. The site records all the data, allowing the buyer to circulate the estimate by taking a printscreen off the browser or sending it by e-mail instead of spending a couple hours typing out an Excel spreadsheet and faxing it. Using the estimator, the entire process can be done in 15 minutes.
Bidding can continue until the auction time runs out.
The longest it can run is seven days, the shortest is 24 hours. Beighle noted that a one-hour turnaround version is in the works. If the buyer sets too aggressive a maximum price, there might be no takers, but convenience over the paper-based procurement process as well as price is likely to draw buyers to the site. This allows companies to keep only one vendor in their system. Request4bid could function as a universal vendor for all a company's IT hardware.