Carol Vorderman's Internet column: Auction stations; LET THE NET DO YOUR BIDDING.

THE Internet has brought the thrill of the auction room within easy reach of average punters.

Now you can buy TVs, computers, cameras, hi-fi's, airline tickets and even books, toys and sports kits at bargain prices.

Collectors in particular can have a field day. Starting today, you can bid for a fantastic array of celebrity keepsakes through Quixell, the leading British auction website.

But you can't wave at an auctioneer over the Internet. So to find out how it all works, I logged onto Quixell (www.quixell.com).

Registering to use the site takes about a minute. Quixell has about 100 items on sale at any one time, updated twice a day. A lot are computers but there are also other electronics items ranging in price from pounds 20 to pounds 1,500.

Quixell claims that its users typically end up paying around half the High Street price. For instance, the top bid for a Dell Inspiron laptop computer was pounds 759. Try to buy computers in the same range direct from Dell and the lowest quote is pounds 1,549.

"Our strategy is to make wafer-thin, profit margins,' says Quixell's owner Tim Jackson. "Normally, there's a string of brokers between manufacturers and customers, each of them taking their little cut. Manufacturers actually make more money with us and buyers get bargains."

Quixell have also introduced on-line auctions for holiday accommodation with properties in the Algarve, Florida, Spain and France up for grabs.

A week in a three-bedroom beachfront house in Alligator Point, Florida was sold this week for just pounds 220, compared to the list price of pounds 350.

Additional travel services and products such as hotels, flights and tour packages will be launched on the site over the coming months.

Once you've registered, you can join the bidding for any item whenever you want.

To counter people bidding then changing their minds and not paying, you have to enter your credit card details before you start. You can do this by phone or fax if you don't want to do it over the Internet. For computers and electrical equipment, most auctions last just 24 hours and start and end at either 1pm or 9pm.

You enter your bid in a box on the site or by e-mail nd a running tally of bids is shown. Quixell will tell you if yours is the highest so far and will e-mail you if someone tops it. If someone bids right at the end of the auction, it will let you know and give you five minutes to respond.

The auction then continues until five minutes go by. If you're very keen to buy but haven't got time to keep an eye on the action, you can set yourself an upper limit using the Quixlimit option.

Each time you're outbid, this will automatically enter a new bid for you until your upper limit is reached . If yours is the top bid, Quixell will deliver the item to you the next day. For any items up to 25kg (which covers most on sale), the cost is pounds 2.95 plus VAT. Quixell also runs quickfire, one-hour auctions called Quixell Quickies. They usually start at 5pm and tend to feature more unusual products.

By now I'd been bitten by the bug and couldn't wait to start bidding, so I decided to dive right in. Recent Quickies have featured a magnum of champagne and two hours with a masseur, so I was slightly disappointed to find out the most exciting item on offer was a telephone.

But it was a very nice phone: a Philips TD6210 cordlesswith a one-year warranty. The minimum bid was pounds 1.

Worth a try, I thought, and tapped in a pounds 1 bid. Bad luck, the site told me - someone else has already bid pounds 45. I tried pounds 46. But someone had already bid pounds 51. I tried pounds 52. Sorry, it said, the top bid is pounds 63 now.

Blimey, I thought, this is fast and furious. I paused for a second, bid pounds 64 and found someone had bid pounds 71. And it was still 5.07pm. The phone finally sold for pounds 99 - too high for me. But I'll be going back to Quixell because there's a lot there I'd want to buy, I can visit it whenever I want and it's actually quite good fun: a real-life game of cat and mouse that might just net you a bargain.

There are other auction sites you might want to take a look at. BidnBuy (www.bidnbuy.com), an Irish site, sells electronic goods and computerswhile computer company Morgan (www.morgan- auctions.co.uk) holds regular auctions of its surplus stock.

The other big players in the Internet auction business are airlines. An empty seat on a plane is worth nothing to an airline once that plane has taken off. So it's better to sell the seat for a song than not to sell it at all.

Virgin Express (www.virgin-express.com) recently sold off 948 seats for an average of just pounds 33 each.

Another holder of regular auctions is Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.co.uk) which sells seats from London, Birmingham and Manchester to destinations including St Petersburg, Istanbul and Bangkok.

You could also try Cathay Pacific (www.catha ypacific.com). If you want to have a look where internet auctions in this country might be heading, check out a couple of the American sites, Onsale (www.onsale.com) and eBay (www.ebay.com)sell a mixture of the weird and the wonderful.

FANCY a set of signed scrubs from Chicago Hope or a poster of Grease with love from John Travolta?

Celebrity memorabilia goes under the hammer at auction website Quixell starting today. You could even bid for a walk-on role in the hit hospital show.

Also on offer are Spice Girls autographs, a cricket bat signed by the 1992 Pakistani team and a child-size crew jacket signed by the cast of Star Trek. Other collectables include champion Olympic hurdler's Sally Gunnell's track shoes and signed footballs from Premiership clubs Everton and Crystal Palace.

The auction is in aid of the charity Express Link-up which supplies computers and Internet connections to children in hospitals.

Bidding is open now and a selection of items will be available each week until December 12. For a list and information on how to take part, visit www.quixell.com/charity