EBay, the online auctioneer, plunged into the red during the third quarter of the year, after being forced to admit that it had drastically overpaid for Skype, the telecom group that it bought in October 2005 for $2.6 billion.

The $936 million (£458 million) deficit marks the first time in eight years that eBay has made a loss, and takes into account the $900 million writedown on Skype’s value, revealed this month. The loss compares with a profit for the corresponding quarter last year of $281 million.

Meg Whitman, president and chief executive of eBay, gave warning that a further slowdown in retail spending in the United States would also hit eBay sales. Americans are struggling with the worst property recession for 16 years. A number of homeowners are also facing higher mortgage repayments as adjustable-rate loans are reset to a higher rate.

Ms Whitman said that she could not yet identify the latest “must-have” product, for which eBay became famous. In its 12-year history, the auctioneer has benefited from pent-up demand for items that were either rare or sold out in main-stream retailers. In the 1990s, eBay saw frenzied online buying of Cabbage Patch dolls. More recently, the Nintendo Wii gaming console became a “must-have” item.

“We don’t see something of the magnitude of a hot product like the Wii this quarter,” Ms Whitman said.

However, the San Jose-based company still exceeded Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter to September 30. It reported record sales of $1.89 billion (£927 million), up 30 per cent on the same quarter the year before. The group attributed the surge in revenue to the success of PayPal, its electronic payment business, and healthy sales outside America. Ms Whitman said that sales going into the fourth quarter were satisfactory.

This month, eBay admitted to greatly overvaluing Skype and made a one-off payment of $500 million to Skype’s founders to close the earn-out agreements that the executives signed when they sold to eBay.

Yesterday, Ms Whitman said: “We are disappointed by the writedown, and we’re behind in terms of some financial metrics we had originally anticipated . . . but I do hope the ability to get the earn-out out of the way and reorient the strategy may be back on track.”

In after-hours trading, shares in eBay shot up by 5 per cent to their highest level since April last year.

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