Wal-Mart begins Free Online Classifieds

The service, which the retailer described as a pilot test, carries 30 million items, including foreclosed homes, basset hounds, Madonna concert tickets and a 1981 Ford Firebird, as Wal-Mart tapped into Oodle Inc.'s menagerie of listings.

The service doesn't charge the seller or the buyer and is accessible through Walmart.com, the site the company uses to sell its own products. Wal-Mart said the new offering "further connects our community of 130 million customers who shop the Wal-Mart brand each week."

A spokesman declined to comment on financial details of the relationship or on the length of the pilot test. In the past, it has test-marketed online sales of movie downloads only to later discontinue the service.

Oodle.com was launched three years ago in the San Francisco area by former eBay Inc. and Excite executives.