Two interesting facts have emerged over the last few weeks. Firstly, Amazon has for the first time attracted more visitors to their site than eBay. Secondly eBay have just announced that for the first time the sales worldwide of "buy it now" items have exceeded those of auction items. Fifty six per cent of the items sold on the site are now immediate purchases and that figure is expected to grow.

This could be an indication that the public are falling out of love with the auction concept. In today's instant gratification society people are not prepared to wait five or more days for an auction to end. I think that another factor is that often people wait expectantly being the highest bidder until seconds before the end of the auction when software generated bids come flooding in and they lose out. This can become frustrating and very annoying.

Over recent years there has been a certain amount of bad publicity over the quality and in some cases the origin of some of the products sold on the site. Several major manufacturers have taken eBay to court because they had allowed fake copies of their products to be offered on the site.

It is not only buyers that are forsaking the auctions, sellers have also left in droves annoyed by eBay's price increases and rule changes that seem to favour the buyer over the seller.

In recent times eBay has gone out of its way to attract leading retailers to offer their goods as instant purchases on the site. Such names as Tesco, Argos and Debenhams are already using eBay as a marketing tool and more big names are expected to follow. This is seen by many as pushing the small and home based retailers out of the picture.

In October eBay had over 243 million unique visitors including 20 million in the UK which is about 1/3rd of the population. So eBay as a site may not be losing its appeal but obviously online auctions do not attract the public as they once did and may be on the way out.

One small problem has appeared for eBay, some manufacturers have put a block on companies and individuals selling their products through the eBay site. They do this apparently by cutting off supplies to non "bricks and mortar" businesses and those who offer their products at cut prices on the Internet. It will be interesting to see how that one works out.