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ITHE Internet's popular auction site. .a eBay, brings together buyers and sellers of everything from baseball cards to old paperbacks-then leaves it up to them to work out their own shipping arrangements.

But when selling lumber electronically. shipping becomes more important, since building materials are a lot bigger than baseball cards. "Freight is something that has to be addressed," says Arnold Kraft, president and founder of online marketplace eWood.com. "With building products, the freight can sometimes cost more than the goods."

Many sites, including e-Wood, take the easy way out-linking to service providers, such as Clicklogistics.com, that can provide near-instant freight quotes.

Telpx went a step further, embedding freight charges into its electronic trading system. "We took freight into consideration from Day One," says Telpx's Rich Haddad. "Our system automatically calculates freight and includes it in the transaction. We give the freight to the mills, because they generally are the ones with the freight book. We give them an electronic version of a freight book."

Columbus Lumber Co., LLC, Brookhaven, Ms., provided T.q.LPx with a truckload rate per mile, so their offerings automatically would reflect a total, delivered price. The trick, explains Columbus v.p. of sales Kirk Hammond, is that "you have to watch the board footage to make sure (the bid) is a legitimate truckload, that it's not over or under about 22,000 bd. ft. One went through at 25,000 ft., and it threw the freight way off."

After Columbus' sales department accepts an order, they print a copy for the shipping department. It's then up to shipping to find a trucker or rail shipper, hopefully for no more than what Columbus already agreed to charge the buyer.

Another alternative is for buyers, especially local ones, to arrange their own pick-ups.

What's not imbedded in the system is tracking. Tnlpx instead links to NetReady, which charges a minimal fee to track rail shipments. Harder to check are truck shipments (about 407o of Tar-px sales go by truck vs. 60Vo rail), although some of the largest truckers do offer tracking akin to Federal Express' barcode-based system.

As far as tracking and managing inventory online, Newnan Transload, Inc., Atlanta, Ga., is integrating such a system. The idea grew out of LumberTracker, networked desktop software Newnan's Chris Smith developed a few years ago. "It worked pretty well," he says. "I still found out, however, that even with computerization, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking up bills of lading, receiving reports and inventories, and faxing them to my customers, and my customers were faxing everything to me."

Meanwhile, Darien, Wi.-based

Scott Wood Products had developed a program to allow customers to buY online and began marketing OrderManagerl-ive to other comPanies through Salesorders.com. Salesorders took Smith's online management tool and Web enabled it, creating LumberTrackerlive.

"LumberTrackerlive is not an online exchange," Smith says. "It is an inventory management tool suited to mills, producers and reloads. They can track purchase orders, sales orders, inventory, freight and have an order history all online and for multiple locations. They can enter all their sales orders and purchase orders themselves or they can allow their customers and vendor to enter that information for them. They can allow their customers to come online and make purchases from their inventory. The inventory is updated automatically. The system can be set up to email distribution yards, sales people, comptrollers, truck carriers, etc., automatically when an order is placed."

The system automatically calculates freight, based on the customer. "LumberTrackerl-ive will take the freight in either a purchase order or sales order and do a percentage spread," Smith says. "It knows how much footage or how many pieces of each item are on the load. It then calculates the freight average and adds that back to the cost or sales price per line item."

Currently, tracking is not yet real time. The user enters the rail car or truck and an estimated arrival time. "It will differentiate between on-hand inventory, in-transit, committed and available," Smith says. "When a purchase order is initially entered, it is entered when purchased. That inventory is rolling. When it arrives, the yard then clicks an arrive checkbox and the status changes to arrived, or on-hand. But LumberTrackerLive will also track inventory you have sold, but not shipped and inventorY which is available. This information is displayed on one grid, so a user knows instantly the status of the material they have for sale."