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Back in 1911 a group of flower growers met in a small cafe in Aalsmeer in the Netherlands and founded a cooperative designed to cut the role of the middlemen who were siphoning off their profits.

Today the Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer runs the largest horticultural auction in the world. It sells more than 18 million flowers and 2 million plants every day, generating more than $1.4 billion in annual revenue. Its stadium-sized arena dwarfs the nearby cafe where the cooperative was born. But Bloemenveiling is looking to prune its operations again, this time by moving part of its business online (www.floweraccess.com).

"We're bringing the business back to its basics, to the growers and buyers," says Jean-Paul Aubrun, marketing and sales director of the EVA, the e-commerce business unit of the 7,000-grower co-op, which serves 1,700 registered buyers. The system, still in its infancy, mirrors the physical market but brings extra benefits: with the click of a mouse dealers can see what flowers will be ready for market in a few days.

Across Europe, online sites are replacing or adding to established auctions and changing the way business is done in areas as diverse as car salvage and airline tickets. As auctioning matures it will be used to test-market products to see what price the market will stand, to find more buyers and to liquidate excess stock. On the consumer front, however, e-entrepreneurs on the Continent are taking the type of Internet auctions popularized in the U.S. as their starting point and refining the auction model, focusing it and turning it into a more sophisticated, specialized tool.

In June Sotheby's, the venerable auction house founded in 1744 and famous for selling Napoleon's library in 1811, announced it was signing a deal with Amazon.com, one of the Internet's biggest and best-known e-commerce sites. Amazon will continue to operate a separate online auction site it opened earlier this year which offers everything from Beanie Babies to hardware. The new co-hosted site at www.sothebys.amazon.com will focus on everyday collectibles such as stamps, sports items and Hollywood memorabilia, offering Sotheby's assurances along with the sellers' guarantees of authenticity and condition. Only dealers who register with the site will be allowed to sell items. And Sotheby's later this year will launch its own site, www.sothebys.com, featuring the major auction of its own showrooms and partner establishments as well as online sales of fine and decorative art and jewelry. More than 2,800 dealers have signed up and will also be given the option to participate in the joint auction site with Amazon.

But Sotheby's faces some nimble competitors such as the U.K.'s iCollector, which has a five-year head start and established relationships with some 200 auction houses, dealers and galleries. iCollector highlights auctions in the real world, holds online auctions and offers a reference service which includes the sale price of thousands of recently sold items. Although some of the Continent's antiques and artistic treasures may feature on its lists, its latest big effort is an auction of Elvis memorabilia that closes in Las Vegas on Oct. 10. Fans can bid via the iCollector site (www.icollector.com) before the sale opens. The U.S.' eBay, the vast garage-sale operation where some 250,000 items from thimbles to baseball trading cards are posted daily, is also targeting the European market.

But European companies are putting their own spin on the business. PenBid, a Denmark-based online auction site created in April by Nikolas Gough, 31, and Kim Paludan, 28, has quickly found favor with pen collectors all over the world, auctioning off over $900,000 worth of items in its first four months. "A year ago we found out how much eBay was making and we thought we could do things much better. My idea was to found a pen-only site," says Gough. "We were able to introduce separate auctions for each make, with separate actions for pencils, accessories and so on."

PenBid (www.penbid.com) targets both U.S. and European customers so it bases its operations on New York time but also includes links to a translation system for non-English speakers. PenBid hopes to break even in six to 12 months' time. In the meantime Gough and Paludan are planning to launch an online auction site for watches.

For its part, eBay has snapped up a successful German online auction house to establish itself quickly in that market and will launch a full auction service in the U.K. by October. "The fact that eBay is so well known and has done so well is a huge advantage for us but I know it will be a fight in each market we enter," says Michael van Swaaij, eBay vice president for European operations. "The competition is smart and well funded." QXL, one of Europe's most aggressive auctions site, has adopted a hybrid model. It offers new products such as computers and cameras, and holidays and air travel from major companies as well as traditional eBay-type auctions. With $30 million in venture capital behind it, QXL (www.QXL.com) has launched in the U.K., France, Germany and Italy.

But eBay's biggest challenge may come from a less well-known source: Aucland, set up by 25-year-old French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda. He has raised $18 million in venture capital and will shortly be taking Aucland (www.aucland.com) to the U.K. to battle QXL on its home market. Aucland's strategy is to be consciously pan-European, with items listed on several sites around the Continent.

And, as demonstrated by floweraccess.com, Europe is also putting its own twist on business-to-business auctions. Mercdex.com will launch a site this month where companies can buy and sell excess inventory. A British site is even changing the way the car salvage sector operates. Some 400,000 vehicles are written off in Britain every year. But starting next month, the eSalvage system will enable insurance companies to enter all the details of a vehicle into a computer and, if they decide the car is a write-off, post all the relevant information at www.esalvage.co.uk, where approved salvage dealers can bid for them.

And even that bugbear of auctions — a reliable Internet payment mechanism — is being tackled by a European firm. On Aug. 31 a U.K.-based multi-currency escrow service, I Trust You, (www.itrustyou.com) was launched. It works like this: the purchaser pays his or her money — British sterling, U.S. dollars and Irish punts now, but other currencies will be added soon — into an escrow account. The funds are only released when the purchased goods arrive safely.

Raising the confidence level for consumers while expanding the range of auction services may just entice Europeans to bid online for Jaguars, four-poster beds and chandeliers the way Americans have been using eBay to snap up old Chevys, cedar log bunk beds and pink flamingo Christmas light stakes.