CityXpress Corp., a leading provider of online auctions for the newspaper industry, will add fixed-price and best-offer functionality to its Xpress Marketplace platform. And by September 2004, the platform will extend this functionality to provide support for transaction-enabling online classifieds and display advertising, allowing consumer-to-consumer trading.

The Xpress Marketplace supports fixed price and best-offer transactions within a marketplace and also will enable a newspaper to incorporate these transaction types within its own online classified and/or display advertising.

"We have expanded our proven auction platform to provide newspapers, their readers and their advertisers with a complete local marketplace community," said Phil Dubois, president and CEO of CityXpress Corp. "By providing their existing online classifieds with transaction technology, newspapers can offer ongoing consumer-to-consumer marketplaces, where private-party sellers have the option of selling items online in addition to utilizing the traditional promotional opportunities offered in a newspaper's print and classified sections."

Newspapers have established, credible and respected brands within their community and therefore have a unique opportunity to create thriving local marketplaces from their existing base of advertisers, whether retail or classified, according to Dubois.

"No other marketplace technology or service combines those elements and enables newspapers to provide a cohesive offering," said Dubois. "That's a key competitive advantage for newspapers to halt the threat to their classified and retail base from eBay and others."

CityXpress recently expanded its event auction offerings with GetAwayXpress, a travel specialty marketplace that aggregates travel items from dozens of newspaper markets into a common auction site that will be promoted as a single event auction conducted over a 10-day period in early November.

http://www.cityxpress.com