Using the Shopping Helper starts with adding products to your Shopping Lists. How you add products to your shopping lists depends on how you like to shop on-line. However, no matter how you prefer to shop, clicking the Shopping Helper icon on your Firefox status bar is the easiest way to add a product to one of your Shopping Lists. If you use Pronto.com to help your shop, you get many additional ways to add products.
The most important concept about the Shopping Helper's Shopping Lists is that they are not just a list of products: they are a list of products and a list of stores. Each shopping list can have a different list of stores. The Shopping Helper provides a lot of intelligence to automatically define the list of stores for each shopping list based on your previous shopping behavior, though if you prefer, it also allows you to manually add/remove stores to/from each list.
While using Pronto.com's web site, the Shopping Helper icon and 'add to shopping list' will often appear next to products. Clicking this icon allows you to directly add the product to a Shopping List. If you have more than one shopping list, it will allow you to choose the list when you click the icon.
The pages you land on from clicking the 'Compare Prices' button on Pronto.com's pages are price comparison pages. In addition to the icon at the top of this page for adding the product, the Shopping Helper icon also appears next to each store shown in the list of stores. If you are interested in adding that product to a shopping list, and only care about a few of those stores, you can just go down the store list and click the icon next to each store you are interested in to add this store to your shopping list.
The 'shop' button on Pronto.com's pages lead to the product detail pages at the store selling that product. When you visit these pages from Pronto.com, the Shopping Helper will show a Product Banner below the store's web page. To add the product to a shopping list from these pages, you can either click the 'add' icon in the banner, or click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar.
For web pages at some stores, the Shopping Helper may sometimes automatically recognize the product. When this happens, the Product Banner will appear, and you can use the icon in the banner, or the status bar icon to add this product.
When shopping across the web, if you run across a product you would like to add to one of your Shopping Helper shopping lists, simply click the status bar icon. When you do this, the Shopping Helper will present you with the Product Picker containing some images, titles and prices form that web page. It tries to pre-select the correct ones, but in case it has guessed wrong, you can manually select the alternatives. When you click 'OK', you can then select which shopping list to add it to.
If the Product Picker does not show the appropriate choices, you can also manually define the products components. See Manually Picking Products for more details about this feature.
The best view into your shopping lists is with the Shopping List Viewer. To open this window, right-click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar and select the 'Shopping List Viewer' menu choice.
Your can also see your shopping lists from the Shopping Helper Sidebar. To open the sidebar, right-click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar and select the 'Open Sidebar' menu choice.
You can create a new Shopping List at the time you are adding a product, or you can create an empty list from the Shopping Helper Sidebar. To open the sidebar, right-click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar and select the 'Open Sidebar' menu choice. Then, in the 'Shopping Lists' area at the top of the left sidebar, right-click any existing list or products and choose the 'Create New List' menu choice.
Price alerts are automatically generated for any product in your shopping lists. New alerts will cause an 'alert' icon to appear on the Firefox status bar. All existing alerts will appear at the bottom of the Shopping Helper Sidebar. See the Product Alerts help page for more detailed information.
Defining Favorite Stores help the Shopping Helper automatically populate the stores in your shopping lists, and also allows you to perform searches on Pronto.com restricted to your favorites. You can create different groups of favorite stores, which is most useful when each group of stores is associated with a particular category of products, e.g., electronics, books, apparel, tools, jewelry, etc.
Creating groups of favorite stores is done through the Shopping Helper Sidebar. To open the sidebar, right-click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar and select the 'Open Sidebar' menu choice. In the 'Favorite Stores' area of the sidebar, right-click to create a new group of favorite stores, or to add/remove stores form a group.
When you have favorite store lists defined, you can search across all these stores through Pronto.com using the search box on the Shopping Helper Sidebar. Above the search box is a drop-down menu that allows you to pick the favorite store list to use for your search.
As part of the Shopping Helper's automatic price refreshing, it maintains Price Histories for products. To see the price histories, right-click on the product either in the Product List Viewer or the Shopping Helper Sidebar and select the 'See Price History' menu item.