eBay is putting out a message to Wall Street: it can now handle large, high-volume sellers. eBay will announce Q4-2009 earnings on Wednesday and will make its quarterly presentation to Wall Street analysts, where it will need to convince them of eBay's strengths going forward.

Mark Mahaney of Citigroup issued a report on Tuesday after hosting an ecommerce trends call with Mercent CEO Eric Best: "A growing number of Mercent clients are showing interest in selling on eBay now that eBay's platform can more easily accommodate larger/higher volume sellers. Mr. Best noted that Mercent clients were seeing high single-digit to low double-digit same store sales growth through the eBay channel in Q4, outperforming eBay's larger community of smaller sellers and auction formats." (Link to report in PDF format)

Expect to hear a lot about eBay's growing ability to attract large retailers and manufacturers and the success of features such as its Daily Deals.

With traffic flat in the fourth quarter (as measured by unique visitors; page views were actually down year over year in December, according to Nielsen data), eBay executives will continue to paint PayPal as its new growth driver.

Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets stated in his report on Friday: "We expect PayPal to benefit from strength in overall holiday spending online and increasing penetration among off-eBay merchants to grow payment volume by roughly 20% Y/Y vs. 5% online spending growth in the quarter. We expect U.S. Marketplace growth, but still a long road to recovery."

eBay's conference call with analysts is at 5:00 pm Eastern today (Wednesday) after it announces fourth quarter and full-year results for 2009.