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For eBay, the deal will "create an unparalleled e-commerce and communications engine for buyers and sellers around the world", said a spokesperson.

He added that Skype will accelerate "the velocity of trade on eBay and volume of payments through PayPal".

The deal has implications in terms of how eBay users communicate and will certainly raise awareness of VoIP services.

EBay attracts about 10 per cent of UK users' internet time and reaches 100 million people. Consider that some five million emails are sent on the site a day between buyers and sellers - adding voice services will make transactions more efficient, explains Saul Klein, vice-president of marketing at Skype.

But, as analysts report that the real revenue earners for portals are third-party advertisers, so the eBay and Skype double-act has some extra special plans. The deal will allow both to take their first steps into pay-per-call lead-generation services.

Qualified leads

Klein elaborates: "Instead of charging a transaction fee, which eBay does in all its existing business, you would charge for lead generation.

"This gives people in specific areas highly qualified leads that aren't just email contacts. You can literally connect that buyer to a sales person or an inbound call centre," he adds. "To cut that distance between interest and transaction is the Holy Grail of advertising."

Certainly, Skype is a major player in the VoIP market. A two-year-old firm with 54 million registered users in 225 countries and territories, Skype is growing at a rate of up to 200,000 registered users a day, Klein says.

He adds that it is on target to achieve revenues of $60 million this year - seven times that of eBay in its second year.

Broader services

As well as the new ad model, Skype stands to benefit from the eBay brand and user base to promote adoption of its VoIP services.

This will increase awareness of the voice-messaging services available from portals such as AOL, Yahoo! Microsoft and, most recently, Google, which unveiled an instant-messaging - with voice communications - service last month.

A Google spokesperson says: "Now, we are simply extending (Gmail) to instant forms of communication, such as talking and instant messaging.

"We are launching our product in conjunction with a service, which, in future, we hope will allow users from various networks to talk to each other, without having to sign in to or sign up to a new service each time," he adds.

VoIP technology is moving one step closer to becoming commonplace. As Nikesh Arora, VP of European operations at Google, comments: "Real-time communication and information exchange are becoming increasingly important in people's lives."