New Marketplace Offers Real-Time Bartering By Michelle Megna
May 5, 2008
A new online marketplace, Fididel.com, went live today and lets buyers and sellers barter in real-time, offering an alternative to fixed-price and auction style transactions.
"What Fididel delivers is real-time haggling and negotiation, and for sellers, pricing equilibrium with each buyer that comes to the site," said Hal Wendel, CEO of the start up, which is still in beta and expected to launch officially within the next three months.
He offered the following example: You see a golf club for $99 you want to buy, but don't want to wait for an auction deadline to pass and you want to pay less. "There's no mechanism for the buyer to do a knock-knock, tell the seller it's $2 too much, so they go elsewhere, when usually the seller will take that price to make a sale," said Wendel. "Another buyer may want to pay $90, another $94. With Fididel, instead of seeing a price that's too high and walking away, buyers and sellers can settle on a price that they think is fair."
Barter in Real-Time The real-time bartering takes place within a "negotiating screen," based on proprietary technology, said Wendel, adding that there is also a pull-down menu with pre-set responses that allow buyers and sellers to offer prices. Sellers can adjust their pricing in real-time based on buying demand and inventory. PayPal is used for payment processing, though more checkout options will be rolled out as the site grows.
The Price is Right: Real-time haggling at Fididel.
"Most pricing today is one-size-fits all, and opportunities are lost because buyers have different budgets, different perceptions of fair pricing," said Wendel. "We invite them to say the asking price is too high and negotiate what they want instead of having them walk away."
Right now, Wendel said the Fidideler team is taking care of uploading products to the site, though e-tailers can go in afterward to modify and edit their listings.
Sellers e-mail their inventory in spreadsheet form to Sales@fididel.com, with an asking price and a base price, which the site calls the reserve price, for each product. Fididel then enters the inventory into its default pricing structure. Or, e-tailers can request a blank inventory spreadsheet in the site's format.
"Sellers can send us their spread sheet and we verify everything and upload it for them," said Wendel, "and in the near future they will be able to upload the inventory themselves with tools we'll be releasing."
There are no listing fees, and Wendel said sellers only pay a cut to Fididel when they make a sale, based on a sliding scale. He declined to provide details on what the percentages are, but said they are listed at the site.
Members Selling for You In an interesting twist, the site is set up to allow other trained members of the community, called "Fididelers," to sell your products on your behalf if you're away from the computer. In exchange, they get a commission of the sale. A person interested in negotiating on behalf of a seller must go through Fididel University. For more information about the Fidideler community, contact: fididelers@fididel.com.
"If you click on a product, first the site looks for you, and if you're not online, it pushes it out the cloud of negotiators," said Wendel. "If you have thousands of items, and you're offline, one of the trained Fididelers can make the sale for you, based on your parameters."
Wendel said he's confident that the startup will fill a gap in e-commerce. "I think most people prefer to negotiate prices instead of going through an auction or just paying a set amount," he said. "We're very excited to have our doors open for business."
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!
Tools:
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
