Netotiate, in beta,  is a segue from the standard consumers-bidding-against-each-other auction site.  On Netotiate consumers make a bid direct to the merchant: “This is what I want to buy and here is what I am willing to pay for it. What do you say?” The consumer remains anonymous until it’s time to pay, so is in total control of the conversation. The merchant has 48 hours to respond to the product bid. Of course, consumers can only bid on products sold by merchants who have signed up to participate in Netotiate; at first glance we thought we’d discovered a nice assortment.

A quick search for an IPad gave us a choice of more than 2000 tablets and accessories. Ten merchants, including Apple itself , Radio Shack and Buy.com were accepting bids, or so we thought. The filtering functions were robust. We could narrow down by tablet itself, bags, and an assortment of accessories that included memory cards and keyboards. We could indicate our preferences in weight, operating system, carrier, and hard drive capacity.

We said we wanted to pay $400-$600 for an IPad with 60-80gb hard drive, and weighing no more than eight pounds. Only one product displayed – Continue reading →