While auctions provide opportunities to find the best price among interested buyers, reverse auctions provide opportunities to find suppliers with the lowest prices. In reverse auctions, suppliers compete by reducing the price of their bid for products or services, in order to win the deal with the buyer. The use of ERA emerged in the mid-1990s and profoundly affected the way companies procure products and services. In ERAs, the customer is able to gather all interested suppliers online, regardless of their geographical location, at a relatively low cost. By publishing competitive bids in real time to each supplier participating in the project, ERAs promote transparency of information, which coupled with a dynamic bidding process, increases the chances of achieving true market value for the purchase, and results in greater savings for the customer. Because the whole process goes online, it is often faster and more transparent than traditional procurement methods. The advantages of electronic reverse auctions are very clear. For buyers, a reverse auction allows them to extract cost and time savings, and to expand the pool of eligible suppliers, thereby increasing competition. For suppliers, reverse auctions offer the opportunity to reduce business, sales and customer acquisition costs through an improved and accelerated bidding process. Moreover, reverse auctions give sellers better access to new markets and competition, while working to ensure a more level playing field in which small businesses can compete effectively. However, not all ERAs are successful in achieving customer savings, and suppliers complain that ERAs ignore product innovation and quality. Some research shows that ERAs can disrupt the buyersupplier relationship,and some even consider it an unethical procurement tool.