Auction Alfie has launched another great auction tool for savvy bargain hunters.

If you browse the web with Internet Explorer 8 then you can now install the auction accelerator so that you can check the prices of items you see on ANY website.

Accelerators save typing (just like Auction Alfie!) and even save copying and pasting as you can just highlight a word on a website, then simply select the Auction Alfie accelerator to search for that item across eBay, eBid, Amazon and all the best auction sites.

Visit IEAddons to install the free accelerator.

Auction Alfie has been named as the number one money-saving website by The Sunday Times.

This is such a great accomplishment and I am glad people find this unique comparison site as useful as I do.

There are now so many money-saving sites that you need a comparison site for the websites themselves — and that’s where many are now focusing. Auctionalfie.com, for example, compares listings for a chosen item on seven of the most popular auction sites, while mysupermarket.co.uk scours the web for all the best supermarket deals.

They used Auction Alfie to find the best deal on an Apple Macbook laptop:

Suppose you wanted an Apple Macbook laptop, which usually costs £816. You could fill in one search form at Auctionalfie and see that it is going for £600 on Cqout, compared with £770 on Amazon Marketplace.

Thank you Sunday Times.

In an attempt to tackle the high postage and packing (P&P) fees some eBay sellers are demanding buyers to pay, eBay has added a ‘Total Cost’ sort option so buyers can now search for the cost of both the product and the shipping together.

This is a great step forward. I wonder if eBay would go as far as Amazon has gone and set a postage rate based on actual postage costs which the buyers pay and the seller gets a credit?

eBay has unveiled its new homepage design.

The new design is very clean and functional. It retains the product drilldown navigation but also includes features similar to Amazon’s recommendation modules.

However, buyers searching eBay via Auction Alfie are provided with their recent searches to make it even quicker to view previously viewed items.

Try it out

The technical bit – how does it work?

Auction Alfie uses a technology called JINC which was originally coined by prominent Perl Euro-hacker, Leon Brocard (acme). 

JINC stands for ‘JSON in cookies’, but I can’t stop myself from saying ‘JINCs’ so I’ll be referring to it as that from now on (it’s much more catchy anyway – sorry Leon!).

JINCs is a lightweight, client-side method for creating dynamic content with Javascript after storing data in a cookie as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It is a particularly elegant way of dealing with information in cookies as you can eval() the JSON string with one line to retrieve your original data structure.

With the current push for a cleaner and more extensible javascript coding style by people like the Yahoo! Developer Network, JINCs integrates extremely well with this clean way of coding.

The nitty-gritty:

First install the small JSON Javascript library code and some cookie handling code.

Then, once you have created your object you can parse it as a JSON string and store this string in the cookie:

var MYGLOBALOBJECT = new Object();
MYGLOBALOBJECT.TestArray = new Array("hello", "world");
MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie = MYGLOBALOBJECT.toJSONString();
Set_Cookie("mytestcookie",MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie ,expires,'/');


Then to retrieve it:

MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie = Get_Cookie("mytestcookie");
if(MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie != null){
 MYGLOBALOBJECT.TestArray = eval('('+MYGLOBALOBJECT.Cookie+')');
}

You now have your original data structure to play with. Enjoy.

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