PrintBid.com, an online e-commerce
marketplace for print buyers, commercial printers and suppliers to the
printing industry, launched PaperDeals.com, a global auction
marketplace for the $200 billion paper industry.
Leveraging the parent company’s audience of commercial printers, thousands of
companies were pre-registered for immediate access, along with many of the
top name paper mills, distributors, converters, brokers, import/exporters,
publishing companies and major corporations, PrintBid said.
“I believe this Web site will completely revolutionize this centuries-old
industry which has been moving its product through inefficient distribution
channels for far too long,” said Terry Plummer, former vice president of
sales and marketing of Boise Cascade and a a member of the start-up’s board
of advisors.
“This is a conservative industry, so when I heard that major paper mills like
Georgia Pacific and International Paper, plus dozens of the world’s largest
printing and paper distribution companies, were already expressing interest
before the site was even out of beta — that just reinforced my suspicions
that this was going to become a major economic force in the business.”
The site is a hybrid of live auction and exchange business models, customized
to the unique requirements of dealing with more than 5,000 different paper
stocks.
It features lots as small as a few cartons of writing paper to
truckloads of newsprint rolls.
PaperDeals.com is the first of a community of sites which PrintBid.com plans
to establish over the next year, all targeting the commercial printers in
their fold with products and services which they buy daily.
The site offers a unique BuyNow and SellNow function. If a seller wants to
move stock quickly and is willing to sacrifice optimum profit, they can do so
by disclosing their “SellNow!” price — anyone who bids that price instantly
gets the merchandise.
Buyer-initiated auctions also are available, as well as Dutch and Reverse
Dutch (in which prices descend with each clock tick, until all units are
sold).
A small percentage transaction fee is charged to the seller once the
auction is successfully closed. The site was built using Moai Technology’s LiveExchange software.
