Selling Scrap In Cybertspace

摘要

"Scrap is bought, not sold," according to the venerable industry maxim. Buyers decide how much they can pay for a particular material and ferret out sellers willing to accept that price, an arrangement that seems to put buyers in the driver's seat. In recent years, however, the proliferation of new customers in distant markets-especially China-and the emergence of online scrap auctions might be changing the balance of power. An online scrap auction site does for large quantities of scrap metal what eBay does for nearly everything else: It links sellers to a vast, unknown population of potential buyers. For brokering the transaction, the auction site gets a percentage of the purchase price. Scrap sellers who have embraced online auctions like them for one simple reason: they help them make more money. "We have picked up more customers purchasing metals from us," says Randy Castriota, president of Castriota Metals & Recycling (Pittsburgh), "and we are getting better prices."