Online auction giant eBay will now give shoppers more ability to direct the sorts of items up for sale on its Web site, thanks to a new addition to its service.

The company this month unveiled "Want It Now," a service that functions like newspaper or online classified "Wanted" ads by enabling eBay users to announce specific products or types of products that they're seeking to purchase.

Unlike "Buy It Now," which is a feature sellers can add to their product listings enabling shoppers to purchase items at fixed prices, Want It Now merely signals an intent to purchase -- and doesn't serve as a full-fledged agreement or contract.

Nevertheless, eBay said it envisions shoppers using Want It Now to advertise their willingness to buy unique, hard-to-find items.

For their part, sellers can browse the Want It Now listings to find likely buyers for items that they might have not yet listed -- or, in some cases, products that they might have been reluctant to list out of concerns that a market didn't exist for them. In this way, Want It Now serves as a tool to facilitate buyer-seller interaction and boost the marketplace, while also providing an important customer research function.

"With Want It Now, buyers can now tell sellers exactly what they are looking for when they are unable to find it on the site," the company said in an online notice to users. "Sellers can then browse through these requests to discover buyers for their items, as well as get new ideas for what items are in demand."

Shoppers can create a listing through a dedicated Want It Now site -- which will be listed on eBay.com's homepage. Buyers also can access Want It Now after they attempt a search on eBay and receive few matching listings -- the auction site then will offer them the ability to create a Want It Now posting based on that search.

Buyers must maintain a Feedback rating of at least five, or have a credit card on file. The resulting Want It Now requests identifies the username of the shopper responsible for posting them, as well as their feedback and the number of merchants who have responded to the request.

Sellers, meanwhile, can respond directly to an anonymous Want It Now request -- after posting a product that meets that request -- through the posting. The buyer then receives an automated e-mail directing them to the seller's listing. eBay said it would enable Sellers to quickly list in-demand items by making the Sell Your Item form directly accessible from the Want It Now post.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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