It's reinforcing the basic principles behind supply and demand and cutting out the weak links in the supply chain. Buyers and sellers are interacting more directly. To be sure, competitive bidding is at the heart of any sales process today. And the new approach involves more than just electronic haggling. Processes that used to take weeks can be completed in hours.
Buyers can tap suppliers worldwide.
Suppliers can find new business outside their established geographical areas. Technology is creating efficiency and rewarding users with higher quality and value, and it's bound to punish those who continue to dismiss it by relegating them to inefficient, clunky, and time-consuming processes. InformationWeek first started exploring this concept of real-time, online bidding nearly two years ago with a story about Free Markets Inc., a company that operates customized auctions for companies buying industrial materials . Now, Dalton notes, the Internet's ability to make pricing information available anywhere, to anyone, and at any time, is creating a dynamic marketplace in which prices are more fluid than ever. Static pricing will become a thing of the past.