EBay is finding it hard to keep up the pace of its growth

The service, Prostores, gives sellers their own web address but processes their sales through eBay's own systems.

The auction firm is facing slowing growth in key markets for its auctions.

More and more people are using eBay as a shopfront for fixed-price sales, and the company is keen to encourage them to stay with its services.

It also wants to rebuild relationships with sellers some six months after threatening a sharp price rise.

In January, the firm said it wanted to double the cost of a 10-day auction to 40 cents, and raise its monthly subscription for running a basic shopfront on eBay from $9.95 to $15.95 (�8.75).

Slowing auctions

In the decade since it was founded, eBay has become one of online commerce's biggest success stories, outlasting all its competitors.

It made a profit of $256m in the three months to March, up 28% on the same period of 2004, on sales of more than $1bn.

But its core business - auctions - seems to be topping out, meaning the firm needs to focus more on keeping happy the thousands of people who use the site as a shop window for fixed-price goods.

More than 100,000 regular sellers have no site of their own, eBay general merchandise manager Michael Dearing said, and Prostores was intended to make it easier for them to build one.

"The marketplace will continue to be a foundation for a long time, but we know that sellers are interested in finding buyers all over the place and this can help them do that," he said.

The service - initially only available to people in the US - will start at $6.95 a month and will charge a fee of 0.5%-1.5% per transaction, to be processed through eBay's payment subsidiary PayPal.

Users will not have to be existing eBay sellers, although those already paying for an "eBay store" will get a cheaper rate.