It8217;s a deal dot com!

Or consider this: You are a frequent flyer between Delhi and Bombay. With a dozen private airlines operating in India, seats are aplenty. You are a regular customer who flies the discount airline called Air Pare only two stewardesses to a plane, cut-rate pilots, and only peanuts served and you are ontheir e-mailing list. When the airlines senses that it will have spare, empty seats on a flight, it e-mails you offering seats for as little as Rs 2000 Or you can log on to their website and see the booking position. After all, selling a seat for one-third the price is better than wasting that seat. So you fly to Delhi or Bombay to surprise your ageing uncle who might bequeath an inheritance.

Okay, so it8217;s not going to be happening soon in India, given the poor personal computer penetration less than two million and even poorer Internet connectivity only 500,000 Net users.

But in the United States, where some 50 per cent of households now have PCs and access to the Internet, fundamental changes are taking place in the marketplace. The old equation between buyer and seller is changing rapidly. The revolution not only holds important lessons for India, but given that the world is fast becoming a global marketplace, there is already a piece of action for India.

At the heart of this change is therapid growth in electronic commerce 8212; buying and selling over the Internet. Americans splurge more than 2 trillion a year on retail goods 8212; from groceries to cars.

Last year, they bought nearly 10 billion worth of goods over the Internet 8212; only about a half per cent share. But this figure is expected to double this year and grow exponentially for the next several years. By 2005, they could be buying some 30 per cent of goods on the Internet.

This anticipation has brought about astounding innovations in marketing and retailing. Call it e-trade, e-sale, e-tail, e-whatever, revolutionary changes are taking place in the market place. Sales gurus are working out new mantra every day, marketing mavens are rewriting textbooks, and advertising pundits are going nuts figuring out the next play. Old models are going bust and new shibboleths are invented all the time.

Try this one: 8220;You can sell a dollar for 85 cents.8221; Why and how would anyone sell an item below cost price? On the Internet, you can andmake money on it. At least they are trying it. A website called Buy.Com sells goods below cost price. And how does it make money? Though advertisements on its website, which will be sold on the basis of how many people visit the site.

So technically, you can go to Buy.Com and pick up a Toshiba laptop with a manufacturing cost price of 1599 for 1549. The ad bazaar picks up the rest.Last week, a bunch of netheads announced the launch of a site called Accompany.Com which will work on volumes. Let8217;s say you want to buy a particular model of a fridge which retails at 500. You go to the website and register at a 8220;buy cycle8221; which shows the model, and a schedule of discounts that will come into effect as more and more people join the cycle. So if 25 people join the cycle, the price of the fridge drops to 450. If 200 people sign up, it drops to 420. No matter where the price is when someone signs up, all buyers pay the price at which the cycle closes Accompany would have worked out both the bottom price andtime limit.

Essentially, it works on the principle of scale and volumes. And because Accompany does not directly handle the product they will just facilitate shipping, their overheads are low and they can live with low profits.Over time, Accompany.com hopes to build Net buyer communities itself sending or getting consumers to send e-mails to friends, relatives, colleagues who may want that fridge and who can join in to drive the price down.

Priceline.Com tries to offer goods and services 8212; from airline tickets, hotel rooms and even cars 8212; at the price you name as long as you are being 8220;reasonable.8221; For instance, it is not unheard of to get a round trip New York-Los Angeles air ticket for 149 regular tickets can vary from around 300 to 1500, but that8217;s another story. Priceline works on mopping up waste and excess from inventories. Of course, it is entirely possible that the NY-LA journey will involve two stopovers in Chicago and Salt Lake City and will take you 20 hours instead of six with adirect flight.

Then there are Net companies like E-Bay ebay.com and U-Bid ubid.com which are essentially Internet auction sites where you can both buy and sells goods. Big portals like AOL/Netscape and Microsoft are getting into e-shopping in a big way. Yahoo! for instance offers more than two million products from 27,000 stores.

At the same time, individual stores too are toning up on the Net, competing with specialty sites. You can buy CDs and movies on CDnow.com or Reel.com. Or go to the Disney site for more direct shopping. 911gifts.com offers specific gift options.

With the proliferation of online shopping, there are innovations all the time. The number of sites and options are so confusing that some netheads have now invented 8220;bots8221; short for robots that will hunt the Web to track down the best deal for a particular product a typical one would be bottomdollar.com. Some areas have seen seminal changes. Amazon.com, the Internet bookstore and now expanding into other areas hasdramatically lowered the profile and growth of brick-and-mortar bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble which also went online belatedly.There are also new buying and behavioral patterns and transactional problems, but that is another story.

So what is in it for India and Indians? While dollar transactions may still be a difficult proposition for buyers from India, the E-biz option certainly opens up a vast array of goods to India8217;s elite.

More pertinently, it offers Indian businesses the option to sell over the Internet. From Priya Pickles to shawl manufacturers in Kashmir, from Fab India fabrics to a mango grower or merchant in Maharashtra, there8217;s no reason why Indian goods and services should not be getting on the Internet. It may not pan out just yet but the opportunity beckons 8212; sooner than later. For a country whose exports are taking a beating, e-commerce may be a godsend.