Cooqy: a new and fun way to search eBay

[cooqy]

http://www.cooqy.com

Cooqy is a new and fun way to search eBay.

New browser technology provides a rich eBay Desktop for surfing eBay auctions.

Cooqy provides an ad-free, uncluttered eBay shopping experience. Relax, have fun, and enjoy!

Cooqy features:

* Full-featured, intuitive, interactive, animated UI design that minimizes effort and removes ad clutter to make eBay shopping fun.

* Search results are returned in multiple full-featured windows that can be sized, moved, minimized, and maximized.

* Search results can be displayed in List and Gallery formats, as well as on a Yahoo! map.

* Integrated access to browser windows for Item Details and My eBay.

* Category trees can be navigated into sub-categories.

Cooqy currently supports eBay USA.

[cooqy]

http://www.cooqy.com

Cooqy is now 2 months young and new functionality continues to be developed day-to-day.

The original Cooqy functionality was developed in a rush to meet a Jan 31 deadline for submission to the eBay Developer Challenge '06. With that deadline achieved, Cooqy is entering a new phase of refinement.

Recent enhancements include:

* A new tab-based user interface design.
* View item details in brief without pop-up windows to eBay.
* All item photos can be magnified.
* View up to 50 items per page.
* Animated auction end times.
* Many significant performance improvements, especially with thumbnail image loading.

One of Cooqy's goals is to provide faster, more efficient surfing of eBay auctions. Because Cooqy talks straight to eBay's API and doesn't have to format HTML pages, each transaction sends much less data to the browser than regular HTML-based websites.

Cooqy is free and currently supports eBay USA.

[cooqy]

http://www.cooqy.com

More new features and improvements have been implemented, including:

* Improved sharpness of photos and graphics.

* A new image magnifier for item listing photos. Just mouse over item photos to magnify details. Very handy for collectors!

* Support for eBay Canada, ay.

Cooqy is free for all users.

[Losdev]

Hi Coogy

you seem to have a great concept going there. I have one or two concerns as a web developer. (Tell me to buzz off if you like but as an ebayer and online trader your service may be of use :lol: )

1 You use flash files predominently throughout your site, this can be very restrictive as more the 40% of internet users (commercial) and 75% (domestic) still use dial up. Is there an HTML alternative site available? (we use 10mb BB and first load is still over 12 secs)

2 Frames? Have you any strong reason for them to be deployed within these frames? Cross-browser compatibility may be a self imposed constraint on your audience.

Let me know your thoughts.
Regards
D. Jephcote BSc. PCM. Cert Web Apps (Open)

[cooqy]

Hello,

Sorry for the delayed response...for some reason this forum did not e-mail me with your question. Thank you for your kind words re: Cooqy.

We have been waiting a bit before touting the ability of Cooqy to run on older machines w/ 56K modems. The secret is that although Cooqy was designed using new technology (OpenLaszlo), the real power of Cooqy is that it was actually designed to exceed eBay's own HTML website performance and run blazingly fast on old machines w/ 56K modems.

Now that Cooqy is hosted at a new datacenter (as of 3/1/06), we have been conducting our own performance tests. I can report that oftentimes Cooqy will exceed eBay's HTML website by up to 10x. This is especially noticeable when viewing item details w/ a 56K modem.

This is because Cooqy doesn't have to transmit the HTML rendering data to draw screens, and because we strip out the item detail contents. If you haven't noticed, the Item Details pages on eBay are becoming real pigs. Autolisters tend to generate a lot of content.

Cooqy removes all the junk and strips out the noise to reveal just the essential Item Detail information, along with our special Magnifying tools to help scrutinize item photos (why hasn't eBay thought of this?). A 100KB HTML Item Details page on eBay is whittled down to around a 2KB data transmission for Cooqy. Any slowness in observed performance is actually being caused by eBay's API calls...sometimes they can be slow, but even then the performance will at worse equal the performance of eBay's own website.

Nothing is free, however, and there is the initial penalty of downloading our 310KB desktop. But this download is cached in the browser and doesn't need to be downloaded again until we provide an update (which has been frequently lately to add new features). So again, once cached launching Cooqy is immediate vs. many seconds to load eBay's home page, which is quite bloated.

Re: question #2, we use IFrames to integrate the HTML Yahoo! map with Cooqy's Flash-based desktop. There isn't any other technical solution we have found to do this any better or easier. AuctionMapper's solution is overkill IMO and is not what Cooqy is about...we provided the mapping ability because it is so easy to build a mashup and useful for buyers of large items (esp. cars). We have tested this with both IE & Firefox...sorry, but Opera and other browsers are currently just blips in the browser wars, so we don't care to support those today.

Google's map API had bugs that we couldn't fix, but we are looking to find a map service that will support International mapping...Yahoo! maps worked the best for us, but lacks this critical feature currently.

I also wanted to advertise that more features have been added to Cooqy this week, including better support for lower-resolution monitors.

Cooqy also now supports eBay Canada & UK.

Thank you for your interest in our free service...I hope the eBay community benefits from Cooqy.

Robert Yeager
Owner
Cooqy