Word: new
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...herself part of the global marketplace. An Art Deco ashtray she bought for $20 was bid up quickly--and sold for $290. A vase she got for $5 went to a California buyer--for $585. She even sold an old tractor online--for $2,300, to a priest from New York. Checks have been pouring in from as far away as Iceland, Egypt and China. "The top month I ever had in the stall I sold 15 items," she says. "Now I can sell 15 items in an hour...
Welcome to the eBay revolution. Auction sites are one of the hottest corners of cyberspace right now. Online bidders are eagerly competing for new ovens ubid.com and used microscopes going-going-sold.com) There are service auctions, where lawyers can underbid one another for assignments to register patents elance.com) and reverse auctions, where buyers name their own price for a ticket to Hawaii and airlines decide if they will go that low priceline.com) There are niche auctions for vintage surfboards webworldinc.com/vintage and movie memorabilia auction.newline.com) express auctions that wrap up in an hour onsale.com and auction sites where the proceeds...
...Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, introduced its own auctions last year. (Yahoo's big selling point: listing items is free.) And in September, Microsoft, Dell Computer and more than 100 other companies announced that they're linking their websites--and their 46 million users--in a new auction consortium run by FairMarket, a company that creates and runs online auction sites...
...supply-chain process," says FairMarket CEO Scott Randall. They also benefit from Metcalfe's Law (named after Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com Corp.): the value of a network increases by the square of the number of people on it. Every time a conventional online retailer adds a new user, it's just one more person who can buy its products. But every time eBay adds a new user, he can buy from or sell to any of the 7.7 million people already on the network. A retailer, in other words, is one to many, while eBay is many...
...most useful for setting the price of goods of indeterminate value. (Some of the earliest ones were held by Roman soldiers selling off battle loot.) Auctions make more sense for items whose worth is uncertain (an antique chair or a used forklift) than for commonly sold goods (a new pair of name-brand blue jeans...