Going, going, gone! Sold to the highest bidder at the auction, on the phone or on a new eBay platform that will stream Sotheby’s New York auctions live beginning next month.

The new live auctions platform – ebay.com/sothebys – that launched on Tuesday pairs Sotheby’s 270 years of experience selling art and antiques with eBay’s digital expertise and 155 million active users worldwide to meet the demand for online bidding.

The first auctions on the platform will begin on April 1 with photographs and a themed New York sale that will include the 13 letters of the 1970s Yankee Stadium sign that could fetch up to $600,000 from the collection of baseball great Reggie Jackson.

Online art sales are not new. Sotheby’s and its rival Christie’s conduct them. But the platform will bring Sotheby’s vast inventory to a new audience in the hopes of boosting sales and prices.

“What this partnership is about is leveraging eBay’s audience and ability to target that audience and find clients that have the means to participate in a Sotheby’s auction,” Josh Pullan, senior vice president, director of e-commerce at Sotheby’s, said.

Online sales of art and antiques are estimated to have reached €3.3 billion or about six per cent of global sales in 2014, according to a report commissioned by the Netherlands-based European Fine Art Foundation.

Most of Sotheby’s New York auctions will be streamed on the platform except for high-priced evening sales of contemporary, modern and impressionist art and other specialist categories.

Sotheby’s has seen a nearly 25 per cent rise in online bidding in 2014 over the previous year. In an auction of Picasso Ceramics, 75 per cent of the lots offered attracted online bids.