FRAMINGHAM (03/27/2000) - For now, the biggest beneficiaries on the seller side of the digital exchanges seem to be small and medium-size suppliers.
Kevin Campbell, president of Master Design and Manufacturing Inc., a $5 million custom metal fabrication company in Noblesville, Indiana, has found new business on www.suppliermarket.com, which has helped keep his 80,000-sq.-ft. plant runningat full capacity.
He has also nearly halved his sales commission costs by paying a 4 percent fee to the exchange vs. a 7.5 percent commission to a traditional salesperson.
"Salesmen are expensive if you're paying salary and ex-penses, especially the way hotel prices and gas prices are escalating and airline tickets are going up," Campbell said.
"So the fact that I can sit at a computer for $19.95 [per] month and quote millions of dollars worth of work I find pretty exciting," he said. "You could have a staff of 500 salespeople, but there's no way they could cover the whole country and Canada."
But bidding the right priceonline - as in the real world - "is still really kind of a crapshoot," Campbell said. "You hope you can do it for what you say you can do it for."