For many years, eBay (ebay.com) auctions have provided huge profit opportunities to many retailers. The auctions, being easy to navigate and involving little financial risk, have been tremendously popular.

To make auction listings useful and more appealing to consumers, eBay incorporated the ability for sellers to incorporate illustrations of products into their online auction listings. Because the number of images needed to successfully market products online was substantial, new image hosting services emerged that specifically catered to eBay retailers.

Many online services are now available that allow customers to upload pictures from their computer, digital camera or scanner directly to a hosting server.

Some services are highly sophisticated and have incorporated a special environment in which the consumer can easily drag and drop images onto the server without knowledge of file transfer protocol or HTML.

Some even allow customers to size pictures, crop them, make adjustments and perform other image manipulation. The most advanced services will even automatically optimize images for faster download.

Many sellers prefer photo hosting because it is inexpensive. Instead of purchasing a fully featured hosting package, photo services provide a scaled-down space for image hosting at a fraction of the cost.

Auction Pix (auctionpix.com) provides 25MB of hosting space for only $5 per month. The firm's "HostPix" service allows an auctioneer to upload up to 10 images from a browser window at time; control the number of pictures on the server; and provide a specific URL for each image. With the HostPix service, customers are able to store pictures on the server indefinitely, or run for 15, 21, or 30 days before automated software deletes them.

Timber Creek Software (timbercreeksoftware.com) also offers advanced image hosting services. For $120 per month, a customer can host 400 auctions with three images each.

Timber Creek provides its customers with a special FTP client, which includes an image editor that supports rotate, crop, zoom and image resize. The client also permits enables the editing of either local or remote images.

HostPix, Timber Creek and numerous other picture-hosting services offer a competitive choice over the native services provided by eBay itself.

Many auction image-hosting solutions also offer their services for free.

PhotoJerk (photojerk.com) is a free service that hosts images for use in online auctions, forums, personal Web sites and blogs. The service offers photo albums, statistics (bandwidth usage and times images have been viewed) and the ability to upload and rename multiple images. Users can also create individual folders.

Auctioneers with more traditional tastes can also take advantage of Fotango (photos.fotango.com), an online photo service that creates digital photographs from films taken on 35mm and APS cameras and displays them on the Internet.

Fotango will process a customer's pictures, scan the negatives and store the photos in a password-protected online gallery, from which they can be easily integrated into an eBay auction.

For those with advanced computing skills and Internet knowledge, an inexpensive, dependable shared hosting account might be enough to satisfy eBay image hosting requirements. If this option is selected however, the customer should take care to determine whether a discount for eBay image hosting is offered.