The way priceline.com operates its "demand collection system" is it finds surplus inventory or items being sold at fire sale type prices. It can buy these types of items at a bargain and re-sell them to consumers. For example, a customer could be willing to pay $85 for a hotel room. Priceline would look for a hotel with the customer's specifications that would sell Priceline the room for $80. Priceline would make $5 on this transaction. The key to success for Priceline is dealing in bulk so that it can turn these small individual gains into large revenues. Priceline looks for hotels that have vacancies and for rooms that would otherwise remain empty. It offers a price below the normal room price and passes the savings along to the final customer. The hotel is better off also because the room would otherwise remain empty. Priceline tries to find items at low prices in other industries as well such as autmobiles and groceries and plans to move into home mortgages.

There is a movement away from fixed prices. Instead of having set prices, customers are in essence able to negotiate how much they want to pay for an item. Electronic exchanges will continue to develop to exchange all kinds of items including things such as phone minutes and gas supplies. These electronic exchanges resemble a stock market like the NASDAQ where buyers and sellers both become satisfied trading face to face. Priceline's patented process is essentially negotiating a deal that the consumer and supplier feels are fair. This type of a move will allow them to generate more revenue in a bulk quantity which is essential in this type of business.

The result of these constantly changing prices will be prices more closely reflecting their market value. The prices of common items such as soft drinks bought in a vending machine could change on a minute by minute basis. A computer inside a new age vending machine will be able to determine the soft drink demand by taking account of weather conditions and the season. A soft drink on a 100 degree day in the middle of July could have a higher than normal price while one in the middle of winter could have a lower price. This type of mechanism takes into account immediate supply and demand for the soft drink and determines the equilibrium price. The whole idea of everything going on here is finding a middle ground price where the consumer and producer can agree on.

Priceline.com is not only making changes from an economic standpoint, but is also changing, and will continue to chage, the way society functions on a day to day basis. It is a company creating a new way of doing things based on new technologies. As previously stated, Priceline is already changing the way people buy cars, finance homes, and travel using airlines and hotel rooms. Priceline does what most other e-commerce sites do in that they use business intelligence to gather data on their customers to examine their needs and wants. As IBM experts in their business intelligence division have reported, it costs six times as much to acquire a new customer as to keep an existing one. For this reason, Priceline.com will continue to push their services into new markets that their customers desire.