EBay said yesterday that sellers on its auction site will be able to add a link to their listings that will let potential buyers reach them through Skype, the Internet phone service.
The announcement comes nine months after eBay raised eyebrows by spending $2.6 billion for Skype, a European startup that at the time had just $60 million in sales.
With a few clicks of the mouse, shoppers with Skype's free software installed on their computers can then talk or send short messages to the sellers, ask for more information and, eBay hopes, buy more goods.
Starting Monday, the Skype feature will be available to sellers advertising their products in 14 categories, including real estate, cars and trucks, silver coins and beds.
EBay said it chose those categories because they include expensive items or complex products that can generate many questions. EBay expects the feature to generate an additional $200 million in sales this year.
“We believe that Skype will enhance the way that people communicate and trade on eBay, especially in high-involvement and high-price categories,” Bill Cobb, the president of eBay North America, said in a statement issued as a convention of eBay sellers was under way in Las Vegas.
While calls between the computers of Skype users are free, the company makes most of its money when users buy prepaid blocks of minutes so they can make calls from their PCs to land lines and cell phones.
The perception in the market that eBay paid too much for Skype is one reason eBay's stock has tumbled 22 percent since the deal was announced in September. Shares of eBay rose 40 cents to $30.51 yesterday before the Skype announcement.
EBay executives, however, continue to say that Skype will help buyers and sellers close deals because they can talk to each other. With Skype's free videophone feature, buyers can also get another look at products.
To encourage more people to use Skype, eBay last month eliminated the 2-cents-a-minute charge users in the United States and Canada would normally pay to call land lines and mobile phones in their countries.
Many financial analysts say that Skype will be hard pressed to turn a profit on its own because it is cutting potential sources of revenue and must fend off Yahoo and AOL, which are developing competing products.
But they say that the free phone service should help to relieve some of the concerns that eBay overpaid for Skype.
“It will be a long time before we have the hindsight to determine the value of the purchase,” said Timothy M. Boyd, an analyst at Caris & Co. But “if Skype becomes the No. 1 Internet phone product and totally ubiquitous, it becomes one more spoke in eBay's strategy.”
