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James Thompson has written an excellent article on "The changing face of eBay" as it reaches its 10th birthday.

eBay facts

An interesting aspect is that now 51% of eBay sales are through fixed-price transactions with over 123,000 UK businesses trading through eBay. This has been fuelled by online shoppers wanting the instant gratification of a quick purchase and viewing the process of joining and monitoring an auction as tiresome.

eBay key marketing channel?

So has eBay become a key channel to reach the PayPal user market rather than an auction site?  It would certainly appear that ecommerce sites should consider an integrated feed from their main site into an eBay account.  Fanatic eBay users will always search eBay first for whatever they want - so why miss out on potential sales?

Of course this will not be for every brand.  For some brands the associations of "auction" services will still appear to lower the brand value, but for others it could become a profitable channel to market.