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To: Eric Wells who wrote (73068)	8/10/1999 8:53:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

CATCH OF THE DAY: I can get it for you wholesale The Web connects a million suppliers to a million stores, but stores need help managing their relationships with suppliers. In other words, all claims to the contrary, the Web doesn't kill the middleman, even if the need now is more for information centralization than for control of warehousing and shipping. Of the many companies attempting to manage the information flow around consumer products, I'm most interested in two. The first is Iconomy, which manages a catalog of about 3.5 million consumer products from multiple suppliers, and will handle credit card transactions and customer support as well. Iconomy sells its services to large retail e-commerce sites. There's also a new service, Snapshop, launching this month from Media in Motion. This is also a catalog aggregator, except that Snapshop is designed to enable community site hosts to offer the goods the community is discussing. It's built around the idea that people buy things based more on personal advice than on what a shopping site is pitching. This product will roll out first as a service to Delphi hosts; Snapshop offers about 3 million stock-keeping units from about 800 suppliers. Both companies, of course, take a cut of the sale. The middleman is back.