TORONTO = — As hockey sticks go, the banged-up piece of hickory that sold for $2.2 million to a Canadian on EBay last week was certainly unique. But it's hardly the only example of super-pricey merchandise being sold in online auctions.

A quick search of the global Internet auction giant reveals a whole heap of premium stuff, from yachts and real estate to fine art, like the alleged William Sidney Mount original American oil painting posted this week with an estimated value of about C$5.8 million.

Click over to Mightybids.com or Yahoo's auction store and it's the same deal -- a nest egg of pricey antique items, like Baron Jolley's "Franklin at the Court of France'' painting, from 1778, posted on Mightybids this week with a starting bid of US$80,000.

Toronto-based online auction agency Auctionwire, which handled the sale of the hockey stick, purportedly the world's oldest, says EBay has "a magnetic pop cultural draw.''

But traditional auction houses apparently aren't feeling the pinch.

"We haven't noticed a huge difference, I would say, in sales that we would attribute to online auctions,'' says Rob Cowley, director of Joyner Waddington's Canadian Fine Art auction house in Toronto. It posts its catalogue online but does not offer web-based auctions.

"The competition may have changed a little bit ... but in terms of our income, we may have noticed a small change but nothing drastic.''

It's the same situation at Christie's, which allows buyers to place bids online through its site, but only in conjunction with and during its live auctions. The process is akin to bidding by proxy via telephone or fax.

"We think that a live auction is still central to the core of our business,'' says Christie's spokesman Rik Pike.

"At the moment, this system, we think, is the best offering in the international art market for buying fine art online.''

It isn't just the premium auction houses that have seemingly withstood the growth of online auctioneers, though.

British Columbia-based Able Auctions, which sells mostly local used computers and office furniture -- the kind of stuff you'll also see on EBay -- says in-person attendance numbers at its live auctions in B.C. and Alberta have been steady.

That's despite the fact that it does allow people to bid online while the live auction is happening on the floor, as Christie's does.

"I think over the years, most of our customers who do bid online have also been to our in-person (auctions),'' says operations manager Linda Wenzel in Coquitlam, B.C.

"The product we do sell, in general, is used, so it's in varying conditions ... so we don't allow our online bidding to preclude the fact that it is sold as it is, where it is.''

Sotheby's auction house in New York, which has tried the online avenue but now only hosts live, in-house auctions, believes it has withstood the online tide because of the value of what it sells.

"Our average lot value is close to $40,000 -- that means the average of things we sell -- so most online business I think is vastly less than that,'' says spokesman Matthew Weigman. "I mean . . . do you really want to spend (that much) without seeing something?''

Well, at least some people don't seem to mind paying that much and more online.

Auctionwire says the average starting bid for the items it helps sell is C$20,000. It once sold Barry Bonds' 715th homerun baseball over the Internet for over US$220,000 in New York.

It's all part of a trend in which sellers are starting to realize the global reach of these websites, while security measures that help fend off bogus bids improve, says Auctionwire founder and CEO David Romeo.

"What we do is a bidder qualification process that protects both the buyers and sellers of the item,'' he says, adding that could include identity and credit checks and bank verifications.

"We are not authenticators but we do make sure that ... we do all our due diligence, and that's clearly expressed on the auction page itself so that the prospective buyer can take this to whomever they use for authentication and do their homework, which they should, and just verify these things.''

Sotheby's delved into online auctioneering in 2000 but ceased the operation in 2004 because clients didn't want to buy fine art that way, says Weigman.

"We certainly made a very concerted effort to generate an independent inventory for online sales,'' he says.

"We went into partnership with 2,500 dealers (across the United States), we built our site, we worked on the site with Amazon.com and then worked on the site with EBay.com after that. We tried to make it work and we didn't.''

Joyner Waddington's has also tried the online avenue and has posted items from its Inuit art department exclusively on the Internet for auction. While the process worked well, the company has no plans to put its entire stock on the web, says Cowley, because buyers enjoy the live auction floor experience.

"Live auction is the way that they're found to be most effectively sold,'' says Cowley.

"Especially with major items, clients usually like to see them in person and come to the preview.''