"D-commerce - white hot space"

Rael Levitt, CEO of new company, SalesBid a proponent of D-commerce and provider of online dynamic commerce solutions explains:

D-commerce focuses on the use of dynamic pricing mechanisms, which involves "active or flexible pricing" as opposed to traditional fixed or list pricing. This allows the seller to deviate from the list price until an agreement on price by both parties is reached.

Dynamic pricing allows prices to change not only from product to product, but also from customer to customer and transaction to transaction.

Using the internet as its medium, d-commerce allows virtually any business to increase its potential to achieve a fair price, by overcoming the barriers of fragmented markets and geographical diversity. This allows buyers to get the best price from their suppliers and vice versa. SalesBid, which CEO Rael Levitt says is a South African pioneer in "d-commerce" exchange, launched its first site in the United Kingdom last month. The solution that SalesBid developed is a B2C (business to consumer) auction site for chess products, and has 1,7 million page impressions a week. "The levels of the online traffic and sales generated for our client, London Chess Centre has ensured the success of their e-commerce strategy and created a significant new revenue stream for the company."

In South Africa, the SalesBid network has already attracted considerable interest with its rapidly growing consortium of auction sites that includes some established business brands on the Web. The SalesBid network has the potential to reach millions of website visitors each day.

SalesBid has quickly captured the attention of other leading South African vendors to channel their products and services through the auction exchange.

SalesBid have already partnered with companies across a variety of industries including property, motoring, travel and tourism, electronics and equipment and recreation.

"We chose SalesBid to power our new auction site because they are able to provide us with a robust, dynamic commerce solution in addition to expansive distribution through the SalesBid Network", said Russell Schiff, the Marketing and Sales Director for Hertz South Africa, who recently joined as a SalesBid Partner. "Auction functionality will add another dimension to the Hertz Car Rental site and allow us to sell our used motor vehicle fleet through our Alisa Car Auction site. The site allows our customers to determine the price they want to pay for our cars and rental services." "We want to be a major player in business-to-business (B2B) arena through enabling companies with dynamic commerce solutions," says Levitt, who is a household name in the auction industry.

South Africa has seen a proliferation of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction sites and Levitt points out that SalesBid never hosts its own auctions and will never be an online fleamarket. "We empower our clients by providing them with simple, affordable dynamic commerce solutions that enables them to run and control their own ecommerce transactions on their own site, which helps to build their corporate image and branding."

SalesBid offers three distinct dynamic commerce solutions. The first is a promotional pricing solution - a basic solution which gives businesses the opportunity to provide online "promotional incentives" for their products/services by offering customers special prices for a limited time and/or quantity.

The second is the more well-known auction solution. A variety of auction types are available all with distinguishing features. These include the English auction where single items are sold and the highest bidder wins, and the Dutch auction, where multiples of the same item are available.

The third dynamic solution is business to business (B2B) exchanges which encompasses the more complex "reverse auction" which is procurement based and allows sellers to become the bidders with the lowest bid concluding the transaction.