When Sharon Balkowitsch sold antiques from a stall in Bismarck, N.D., she was a victim of geography. There were few buyers in her hometown of 54,000, and prices were low. She started putting her wares up for auction on eBay last year and suddenly found 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 go to charity webcharity.com)
For an industry that's all of four years old, the dollar amounts are staggering: $4.5 billion in sales this year, and an estimated $15.5 billion by 2001. eBay is the dominant player in the online-auction world, with 7.7 million registered users bidding on some 3 million items. But other Internet heavyweights are hard at work trying to break off some of the market for themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). 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.
Industrial players are also getting in on the online-auction craze, driving down the cost of equipment by bidding to buy it directly from suppliers. There are business-to-business sites for construction equipment ironmall.com and for farm machinery like cotton pickers farmbid.com) Bulk quantities of latex paint are up for auction at paintandcoatings.com and pulpandpaperonline.com has basket centrifuges.