HP Unveils Partnership With EBay

HP last week said it has inked a deal with eBay and Accenture to open HP Store, an online storefront on the e-commerce giant's site. For now, HP will be paying close attention to how the HP Factory Outlet portion of the store performs. Refurbished PCs, servers, workstations and other hardware will be available for purchase at www.stores.ebay.com/hpfactoryoutlet.

An HP spokeswoman said the company has no plans to expand its eBay product offerings beyond these products.

Todd Lutwak, director of computer categories at eBay, said the public perception that eBay is strictly a consumer-to-consumer forum is out of date. "Now we notice a lot of business-to-business activity," he said.

Ebay recently reorganized products ranging from workstations to PDAs to digital cameras into a single category, dubbed Electronics, and expects to move $2.2 billion of products through this area in 2002, Lutwak said.

Solution providers said the deal should have little impact on them.

"We [could buy from eBay and package a solution, but at the end of the day, we are responsible for warranties, deliverables and the complete solution," said Bharat Manglani, CEO of FootPath. Hardware accounts for less than 5 percent of the Waltham, Mass.-based solution provider's billings, he said.

HP is using Accenture's Connection to eBay service as the engine behind the store. Accenture launched the service last May to help manage transactions.

ChannelAdvisor, one of a roster of companies that have sprung up to cater to eBay's "power users," wonders about Accenture's longevity in this space. "Here is a firm that goes into enterprises and state governments and does multimillion-dollar deals," said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, Research Triangle Park, N.C., which facilitates eBay sales of IT products for Acer, Dell Computer and Motorola, among others. "Now they are going into HP and doing small deals?"

CRAIG ZARLEY contributed to this article.