Many small sellers believe that eBay has a plan whereby it intends to drop them in favour of large national and multinational concerns who can list huge numbers of items at one time. eBay probably considers that this is the way for them to go.

By offering discounts and incentives to these companies the other sellers claim that eBay is no longer a level playing field. Some experts also believe it is only a matter of time before the auction feature disappears entirely from the site and there will only be the “Buy It Now feature available. It has also been suggested that eBay may be looking to the day when they will only have New items for sale on the site. Only the top management know their real game plan but more evidence that the big boys are moving in when it has emerged that Tesco have launched a virtual store on eBay offering electrical products including iPods for less than £20.

They are using the site to offer returned and repaired items such as televisions, digital cameras and vacuum cleaners from brands including Sony, Philips and Samsung. However, they are actually offering some of these items in the auction format and buyers can bid from as little as 99p for items such as a Canon DC95 DVD Camcorder. There are also fixed price items such as an iPod for £19.97 about 1/3rd of the normal price.

A spokesperson for Tesco said: 'The new items are products that were previously available through Tesco stores or Tesco Direct but have now been discontinued. They come complete with all the necessary parts and accessories and are still in their original packaging.

'A large proportion of these items have never been used. They might, for example, be unwanted gifts or products customers have simply changed their mind about. They have been checked, inspected, repaired (if necessary) graded and re-boxed. All refurbished items will be clearly marked in the description.'

The other Saturday the eBay search facility was down for many hours and it is believed that this was caused by some major US retailers attempting to list many thousands of products at the same time. This caused some smaller sellers to lose business because searchers could not find their products before their sales closed.