Auction Alfie has expanded it’s auction search tool to include Australian auction websites.
Australian auction and bargain hunters can now search eBay, eBid, Oztion and Gumtree with ease, making sure they get the best prices in the cheapest online auctions.
The auction and classified market is huge in Australia and Auction Alfie is keen to add more of the best Australian auction websites in the near future. Let us know which sites you would like to see included.
If you have a customised Google homepage (iGoogle) and you love Alfie you can now join them in harmony by adding the Auction Alfie Google Gadgets.
There are both US and UK gadgets to help you search the best auction websites.
Add the gadgets
Enjoy.
Tazbar.com has launched a new brand and website. According to Tazbar the new website is “will have the new logo and colour scheme. New control panel, complete new help system, complete new place advert and advert pages. There are a number of navigational changes that you will soon become familiar with.”
Indeed, the site is slightly easier to use but does break on certain screen resolutions, so you may have to scroll down through lots of blank space to find what you’re looking for.
You can still search Tazbar with Auction Alfie’s auction search to compare the products with other auction websites like eBay, uBid and eBid.
Zippi is a new service aimed at ‘lazy’ sellers or people who have stuff to sell but really can’t be bothered to spend time taking all the photos and listing the items on eBay.
Well, how does it work?
In the words of Zippi: “Zippi will zip on over, pick everything up and sell it all on eBay for you. We take care of the whole process, start to finish.”
Of course, you pay for this service but if you have enough to sell then it could certainly pay off.
Yahoo! US Auctions has finally closed down. This is a real shame for sellers wanting a free alternative to selling stuff on eBay.
Who will take their place?
Well I should imagine both eBid.net and uBid.com will rise to the challenge in an attempt to rival eBay but time will tell. Stay tuned.
Check out other auction sites.
uBid.com has been added to Auction Alfie’s tabbed auction search.
US shoppers can now compare products on uBid.com with ebay.com, ebid.net, Tazbar.com, InetBid.com and Liquidation.com.
uBid.com offers new, overstock and refurbished merchandise in their online auctions from established businesses. uBid.com currently offers around 200,000 items for auction.
uBid.com offers brand-name merchandise spanning over 200 merchandise categories including computer products, consumer electronics, apparel, housewares, watches, jewelry, travel, sporting goods, home improvement products and collectibles. More about ubid.
Sellers using Tazbar auctions can now attach Google Checkout to their seller account to get much cheaper transaction processing fees.
Introducing this choice for sellers is great news. At the time of writing the Google Checkout fee is 2%, whereas PayPal is 4.9% in the US (3.4% in the UK).
More information on transaction fees:
Amazon has certainly nailed the usability features for repeat users, such as ‘Your Recently Viewed Items’, but sadly eBay doesn’t provide this simple feature yet, without actively creating Watchlists after signing in.
However, buyers searching eBay via Auction Alfie are provided with their recent searches to make it even quicker to view previously viewed items.
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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Tabbing between websites is a quick and tidy way of managing different web pages in one place. Auction Alfie has extended this concept to allow tabbed-browsing of auction and classified listing sites.
By filling out one search form bargain-hunters can flick between similar products on all the best auction sites, like ebay, ebid, Yahoo! Auctions and Tazbar, as well as classified listings on Loot, Gumtree and Google Base.
Tabbed search is gathering pace, with sites like Twerq and Auction Alfie offering options for searchers to manage their search results in interesting ways.
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