Lycos Helps Shoppers Meet Their Match

New service brings buyers and sellers together by using a reverse-auction format.

Chris Yurko, special to PCWorld.com

Lycos has always been able to help you search the Web. Now, the popular portal has added a new feature that helps you search for merchandise.

Called Merchant Match, the new service brings buyers and sellers together by using a reverse-auction format. Shoppers fill out a form requesting a specific product or service; the request is subsequently sent out to appropriate vendors, who then bid on it.

The service is free for consumers. Sellers are charged a $10 a month subscription fee and a lead fee of $1 to $4 for each request to which they respond. There's no transaction fee when a consumer decides to buy something.

The service wasn't built from scratch: Lycos decided to incorporate existing technology provided by NetgenShopper.com, which also powers similar services on Verizon SuperPages and InfoSpace.

Lycos officials think that the new feature will benefit both the consumers and the small and mid-size businesses putting goods or services up for sale.

"Rather than opening up the yellow pages and picking out four or five businesses and calling up each one, with NetgenShopper, a single request is sent to all the vendors in the system that have registered to provide that product that the consumer has requested," says Mike Kohonoski, president and chief executive officer of NetgenShopper in Fairfax, Virginia.

Business Bargains

And it allows small and new businesses to gain access to Lycos users without having to pay for traditional button and banner advertising, which was proving to be too expensive for most of them.

"We had to figure out how to channel our users to those products and services they couldn't find on our site before," says Kim Boucher, vice president of electronic commerce for Terra Lycos in Waltham, Massachusetts.

"This way, small businesses get qualified leads and now can afford it," says Boucher. "It gives us coverage for small businesses, and for our consumers gives them selection."

There are more than 800 categories and subcategories from which to choose items, everything from appliances to weddings. Kohonoski refuses to say how many merchants there are in the NetgenShopper pool.

The service does not work exactly as advertised. I made test requests for three items: a bookcase, a desk lamp, and a simple will. In less than 24 hours, I received four responses to the first two requests and one for the will. Not one of them, however, offered a price quote.

My requests could have been too general. For instance, I requested bookcases of "varying widths and depths." But none of the merchants told me what they had in stock or provided even a range of prices. A few asked for more specific information. Some referred me to their Web sites.

Kohonoski says I might have had more luck had my request been more specific, but he also says the open-ended nature of my requests allowed the merchants to provide a more custom-designed approach. "If you do have questions," he says, "the conversation allows a natural progression between buyer and seller to take that conversation to a sale."

He also points out that NetgenShopper is not supposed to be entirely price driven. The request forms do have a place where you can select the criteria most important to you "other than price," such as customer service, location, delivery time, experience, and quality. "We try to tie in the intangibles," he says.