Wanna Buy? What Am I Bid?

Bidding on uBid.com (www.ubid.com) is more like dealing with a single company than with an online-auction intermediary. A division of Creative Computers, publisher of the PC Mall and MacMall catalogs, uBid.com takes possession of all merchandise before it's put up for bid. That's important: Not only do you know whom you're dealing with, but any item that you buy will most likely reach you faster than it would through a third-party vendor.

To keep your competitive itch under control, uBid.com also lists a "maximum bid price" next to its description of each item. You can exceed the maximum bid if you'd like, but it serves as a check on overbidding. The maximum bid for a Palm II organizer, for example, was $399 - the same price listed on 3Com's PalmPilot Web site.

Surplus Auction (www.surplusauction.com), a site run by Egghead.com, is strong on brand-name hardware products from IBM, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard, as well as on software. With its Mega Auctions, in which more than $1 million worth of items are sold each weekend, Surplus Auction brings into the online arena some of what's fun about real-world auctions. Each Mega Auction starts on a Friday and closes on a Monday morning, and offers bulk quantities of low-price products like software and memory chips (for example: 1,500 copies of Corel Office).

Competition for computer equipment is particularly intense, since it involves resellers and company purchase agents.

Kurt Jenkins, 28, an MIS manager for Digital Media Graphix in Knoxville, Tennessee, has bid for bulk supplies of computer equipment on WebAuction (www.webauction.com). "You can't just be out there impulse-buying," he says. "Sometimes I put in a bid for 50% of the value of a product, just to see if I get it - but I never do."

Where's the Fun Stuff?

Online auctions have come a long way in a short time from their original emphasis on selling hardware and software to geeks. Today practically anything that can be legally bought and sold can be (and is) bought and sold through online auctions - from live cattle to goose-down comforters, from Elvis memorabilia to antique clocks. When it comes to fun stuff, the place to start is eBay (www.ebay.com), the world's largest virtual garage sale. Everything on eBay is sold by a member of the site's community of more than 850,000 people. Talk about variety! The eBay site lists close to 700,000 items in more than 1,000 categories - from an autographed Magic Johnson jersey to tens of thousands of Beanie Babies.

Buyers and sellers keep each other honest by using a point system to rank the people with whom they've done business, and it's easy to check these rankings online before you make a bid. Sellers often set a reserve price: If no one bids as high as that amount, the item goes unsold. More than 50% of eBay's items are eventually sold to the highest bidder.

Auction Universe (www.auctionuniverse.com), a person-to-person service owned by Times Mirror Co., offers content from niche magazines, such as Beanie World and White's Guide to Collecting Figures, to help you decide whether what you're bidding on is worth the price. Tim Luke, one of Auction Universe's collectibles specialists and a former auctioneer for Christie's, likes the anonymity of the Web. "The online connection makes it easier to ask a question about a piece," he says. "It's less intimidating than a live auction." The site also caters to true auction addicts with its paging service, which alerts you when you've been outbid.

Klik-klok (www.klik-klok.com), a small company based in Nyack, New York, runs one of the Web's few true "Dutch" auctions. Modeled on Holland's famous flower markets, Dutch auctions are essentially the reverse of Yankee auctions: A set quantity of a certain item is available for a limited amount of time. On Klik-klok, for example, each auction lasts just two minutes. When the clock starts ticking, the item is available at its starting price. Then the price starts dropping - and keeps dropping by a few dollars every 20 seconds or so. You try to hold out for the lowest price on the product that you want until just before all the items are bought by bidders willing to pay slightly more. The advantages of this format are obvious: The longer you play, the more prices go down instead of up - and you know immediately if your bid has "won." There's an auction every three minutes on Klik-klok.

Do-It-Yourself Auctions

There's more to online auctions than buying - there's also selling. Do you have a Nordic Trac that's been gathering dust in a closet since last Christmas? A tea-cup collection that's outgrown your cabinet space? Is your company looking for a new way to part with excess inventory? The Web offers just as many ways to sell products through auction as it does to buy them.