To Örebro University

E-auctions are commonly used to purchase large variety of items, including commodities. Most of current e-auction literature presumes e-auction should perform better than diversified products, usually based on their easier specification (e.g. Kaufmann & Carter, 2004) or vast supplier base (e.g. Parente et al, 2010) . We empirically test this assumption using large dataset of real e-auction cases and two methods of calculating e-auction results, concluding that there is no statistically significant difference for savings based on estimated price, while savings based on initial price are actually lower for commodities. We provide discussion on this fact, using the agrument of Beall et al (2003), who state that commodities tend to have lower margins.