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Packaging marketplaces take center stage

This year will be recorded as the year of the Internet "packaging auction gold rush." Auction--and classifieds--Web sites are popping up faster than you can say "network protocol" in the great race to establish Internet-based marketplaces for selling packaging equipment and materials.

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The question is, will people buy a $50ꯠ packaging machine--sight unseen--over the Web? At best, the answer at this early stage is a murky "Who knows?" While several bona fide packaging equipment listings could be seen on the four auction sites reviewed here (with opening bids from $300 to $75ꯠ), we couldn't find a single bid on any machine on any of the sites.

First-generation auctions

Like the first generation of any computer-related product, the sites reviewed here have their share of pluses and minuses. In general, however, all seemed quite thorough, listing extensive detail on the machines, including photography. Virtually all of the sites line up a full complement of services to facilitate the transaction, including the all-important escrow service. (An escrow service acts as a neutral middleman to hold onto the cash while the buyer makes sure the machine is as advertised. This service, extremely popular for consumer-oriented auction Web sites, goes a long way towards reducing concerns about trading with unknown parties over the Internet.)

One site that's attempting to become an auction portal is TradeOut.com (www.tradeout.com). Its site lists auction categories for everything from furniture to livestock. On the day we visited, a featured auction was 10ꯠ packs of "AA" alkaline batteries, enough to power a Christmas morning for a medium-sized city.

To get to the packaging portion of the site, click "Search by cate-gory" on the home page and then "Packaging" under "General commercial equipment, parts and supplies." This auction site contains packaging machinery as well as unused packaging materials. The site features a concise page summarizing all of the packaging auctions, but it lacks categorization: Packaging materials are mixed willy-nilly with machinery. While it's not a big deal for the 18 auctions underway when we visited, it might become problematic as that number grows.

Another company that's gunning to be the big cheese of industrial equipment auctions is VerticalNet, which runs more than 40 industry-specific Web-based "communities," including one dedicated to packaging (www.packagingnetwork.com). Its packaging auction site can be reached by selecting "Auctions" from the drop-down menu at the top. (The packaging auction can also be reached via VerticalNet's www.industrydeals.com site.)

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