Tag Archives: bidorbuy

bidorbuy looking for mobile developers

Posted by on February 25, 2011 No comments

This just in:

Are you one of those people who knows that apple, gingerbread and cupcake are not just edibles? Do you want to be part of a new mobile initiative where we will build an exciting mobile platform for our 700,000 users?

You are? Great – if you have working experience developing mobile applications on iOS, Android and J2ME, keep on reading.

The bidorbuy geek-lab is looking for people passionate about building mobile applications. You’ll need experience in Objective-C, Cocoa, XCode and should have submitted at least one application to the Apple iPhone App Store. You will be responsible for building bidorbuy mobile applications to extend our current channel reach.

Interested? Of course you are – drop us an email with your CV & portfolio – [email protected]



VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

bidorbuy introduces Internet Explorer 8 enhancements

Posted by on May 1, 2010 No comments

About two thirds of our customers use Internet Explorer 8 and we just introduced our search accelerators which are now available in the Internet Explorer Gallery. Making our website available for search from within the browser enables our users to
access bidorbuy whenever they need a service from it, without having to type the full web address. Additionally, we are always with our users, right in their browser.

The Visual Search is a new search capability we introduced especially for Internet Explorer 8 which allows users to search for items on bidorbuy straight from their search bar without having to leave the page they are on. Click on a suggestion at any time to immediately execute the search without having to type the entire word or phrase.

Our visual suggestions will instantly show you a preview of the results directly in the Search Box drop-down. Where relevant we will display Featured items, Auctions closing soon and Articles & Reviews.

How many steps does it take with your current browser to find a product? Until now it was likely a series of cutting and pasting information from one webpage to another.

Now there’s a better way with the bidorbuy Accelerator which helps you in performing your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to display instantly and visually items featured on bidorbuy.

The above pictures do not do justice to how cool our features work and trying them out will hopefully wow you. Installing those enhancements is really simple by visiting Internet Explorer Gallery — and while you are there, please spend 1 minute to register on the Internet Explorer Gallery site and vote for our enhancements.

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

MTN: The death of the internet

Posted by on April 12, 2010 1 comment

At bidorbuy we pay special attention to performance, as a slow website will irritate our users and will in the end result in lost sales. Over the last few months we have pretty much emptied our bag of tricks and tweaked on many different places and the development team did some amazing work in performance tuning.

The Yellow company still amazes me – not just because they decided again to remove my international roaming option, but also looking at their website. Truly shocking how a company of such size can run a site like this.

A special lesson for the MTN-IT division:

  • Your main page loads 530 KB of plain Javascript (thats 12 JS files). Add to this another 172 KB of stylesheets.
  • While the sheer amount of JS and CSS speaks books about bad site-development, at least an easy fix would be to gzip the JS and CSS
  • Most browsers will block rendering due to JavaScript being in the header – so move it to the end of the body
  • Minify and combine those shocking JS and CSS
  • Your ETags are configured wrong and truly do not serve any purpose – in fact if your server environment is clustered, none of those images will ever be cached properly
  • Fix your 404′s/410′s (such as /images/headerBG.gif)
  • Specify image width/height on your images
  • 41 % (or 74KB of your 180KB) of your CSS is not even used on /Pages/MTN.aspx
  • You have two redirect chains, each taking 400ms
  • You could save up to 30% on your images if you had optimized them properly
  • Never include CSS after a JS, as this will block the parallel download of CSS
  • Don’t include the same CSS twice (i.e. # ../HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css and HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css?rev=wLUP2n6…)

The above are the basics in web-performance management, but again it could be worse, as of writing the meerkat-competition is unreachable.

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

bidorbuy launches PayPal payment integration

Posted by on April 9, 2010 No comments

It has only been 2 weeks after the official PayPal launch and we have soft-launched the PayPal payment integration on Tuesday, 6th April 2010. As far as I can tell, bidorbuy is the only South African online auction place having launched PayPal integration, allowing users to conduct payments through PayPal.

The PayPal functionality works for both international as well as South African accounts and will be rolled out to the remaining sellers over the next week.

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

jQuery revolution @ bidorbuy

Posted by on April 2, 2010 No comments

Over at bidorbuy.co.za we are really introducing a number of firsts in the online auction market. We obviously want to create a user-experience for our buyers and sellers to enjoy their time on our site as well as improve productivity.

Over the next few weeks we will introduce many new features to improve usability. A few weeks back we implemented a jQuery-based search-recommendation which provides users with guided searches and search-recommendations – although noticeable, the new feature is not intrusive.

Another cool feature (it is surprising that we never had this in the past) is to introduce an image-gallery for sellers which will really improve how they can list items. The current image system is truly cumbersome and users are not even able to view images they previously uploaded. The new gallery truly rocks:

Based on jQuery with lazy loading of pages, image transitions, keyboard support, sorting and filtering. The gallery will seamlessly integrate into the seller-tools as well as the current listing functionality. We will also introduce a number of really cool UX features over the next few weeks which will make your auction experience a truly awesome journey :D

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)