You're busy and focused on the primary needs of your business, but you need various services to get things done: Your website designed or upgraded; brochures created for your business; an improvement to your premises. Such projects will take you considerable effort to either do yourself or find someone competent who can do the work for you.

When you look for someone to do a particular job, you probably will go through a Google or similar search, and hope to come up with a list of useful suppliers. Then you browse them and their websites and pick one. Or you might go to a service lister such as ServiceMagic.com, and enter a requirement on their site, with the intent that they should suggest a few potential suppliers.

In either case you tend to fly rather blind. In the first one, where you review a few suppliers from the Google search and contact one, you know little about the supplier and have only your own estimate of what the job should cost. In the second case, you have a rating from the website recommending the suppliers, and you hope that it is useful. You still don't know what the price range should be.

Next we get into scenarios of, "Yes, I do website design. I'm quick, reliable and reasonably priced. I can do it for you within a week. Just send me a description of what you need done, and I'll do the job for you for $30 per hour." Or - "I'll need to come out to look at the site so I can provide a proper estimate of the job. When will you be available to meet with me?"

The supplier's prime motivation is to close the deal with you. They don't want you talking to other people, because the person who has the last word has the best opportunity to convince the customer. Their job is to make it difficult for you to turn them away. You come under pressure to sign up immediately.

There's an alternative to these approaches: Service auctions or reverse auctions.

First, register with a website and post your project in enough detail for someone to bid on without contacting you. The website then may inform registered suppliers in the category and location you've specified that a project has been posted. Frequently the website administrators will also assist in the process of getting bids on your project, sending invitations out to further suppliers.

Suppliers review your posting, may ask clarifying questions, and submit a bid. Generally, these bids are visible to other suppliers, and they compete with each other for your business, asserting their qualifications, emphasizing their licensed status, their ratings on the site, and so on. At the end of the bid time, or earlier if appropriate, you review the bids and select one to contract with.

When the job is completed, you return to the website to rate the supplier, and they return to rate you as a customer (was your description accurate? Were you easy to work with? Did you pay on time? Etc.)

This saves you time in searching for suppliers, gets you enough bids to know what the market is charging for the job you have in mind, and allows you to make a choice without having to face pressure from individual suppliers. Since bids will be public, suppliers can see what they have to meet or beat to be competitive, or what they have to emphasize to differentiate themselves from the competition based on quality, lead time, etc.

Many sites will charge a fee for this service: A membership fee, listing fee, completion fee or a combination.

Take a look at reverse auctions to see how you can save yourself time and stress.