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Technology Stocks : OnSale Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1952)	11/27/1998 9:27:00 PM
From: Austin S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4903

Interesting ONSL post from Yahoo board; Read this for a glimpse of what may yet be to come. That is ... $$$. ***************************************** messages.yahoo.com@m2.yahoo.com ***************************************** Onsale Online Auctions @ onsale.com: A Company Review by: DrGoodThoughts After it was apparent that Onsale and VerticalNet would fail to launch the Industrial Auction in the third quarter, Onsale's stock tanked. However, as it is becoming apparent to investors that this business-to-business auction really will be up and running very soon, people are "smelling" the money that can be made. Onsale will handle little or none of the inventory on these big and small ticket items that it and VerticalNet will make a nice commission on. Posting fees of a mere $50 may cover auction administrative expenses of Onsale and VerticalNet, leaving the commission to filter to their bottom lines. An introductory "free posting" service will be made available to encourage usage of the Industrial TradingCommunities Auctions. Expect a jointly released media release late in November or early in December announcing the live operations of these industrial auctions. You can get a sneak preview of the auctions at www.onsale.com/itc/. It looks like Onsale, Inc. (ONSL, NASDAQ) is sitting on a gold mine. Although stock analysts are predicting a one to few pennies loss for the next fiscal year, the addition of this business-to-business auction may provide some pleasant earnings surprises for Onsale. After Internet auctioneer ebay announced a miniscule 2 cents profit, its stock (EBAY, NASDAQ) zoomed. It looks like Onsale's stock, although advancing smartly during November, may surpass ebay's market capitalization as investors and institutions begin to realize the potential scalability of Onsale's operation and the profits which follow. Onsale has been in operation since 1995 and is run by veteran entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan. It is the established leader in the rapidly growing Internet online business-to-consumer retail auction business, which is starting to get crowded with upstarts such as bid.com, ubid.com, first auction, and egghead.com. In addition, Onsale and Softbank now have an auction up and running in Japan. Onsale is also providing the auction software to power the free Yahoo! auctions that appear to be on a great start that may eventually pass-up the fee-based consumer-to-consumer auctions at ebay.com. Onsale receives a portion of the ad revenue on the Yahoo! auction site, as well as receiving a click-through directly to Onsale icon graphic on the Yahoo auction pages. That is valuable Internet real estate that can be very costly to buy, and a big score for Kaplan. Onsale is advertising on television and at a number of popular web sites. Its number of active registered bidders is rapidly approaching 1,000,000 customers. Its actual number of bids on merchandise will reach 9,000,000 early in December and its pace of bidding has grown. Successful online auctions require a big base of bidders, a good supply of high quality merchanise, and active bidding. Onsale scores high on all of these important attributes plus it provides excellent customer service. Onsale has a nice selection of new and refurbished merchandise that can be found at www.onsale.com, a very user-friendly web site that's fun to use. Can I say anything bad about Onsale? Its shipping fees appear to be a bit high as compared to actual shipping costs, so this may be a profit center. But this is probably coming from the part of me that thinks it is unfair to have to pay $2.00 for a ballpark hot dog that costs me 20 cents to make at home, or a $2.50 cola at the movie theatre that costs a quarter to buy at the grocery. Then again, many catalog merchants seem to charge too much for shipping and Onsale isn't out of line with them. My frugalness lends me to smart shopping and I've found some great buys at www.onsale.com. That's also why I bought some of their stock, as it continues to appear to be a good buy. (c) 1998 Dr. Good Thoughts, all rights reserved. The above article may be used without advance permission if it is published unaltered and with this permission and copyright paragraph attached.