The Shopping Helper's goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to add products to your shopping lists. Subsequent sections below describe five different ways in which you can add products to your shopping lists:
No matter which method is used to add a product, you will use the Shopping List Selector dialog to pick which one of your shopping lists to add the product to. The dialog also allows you to define a new shopping list.
Note that if you only have one shopping list defined, the Shopping List Selector is not shown as the product is automatically added to your list.
While searching or browsing the Pronto web site, you can add a product to one of your shopping lists by clicking on the "add to list" icon displayed next to the product. You will see this icon in product listings, and at the top of product profile pages.
You will also see the Shopping Helper icon next to each store on Pronto's price comparison pages. Clicking the icon next to a store will add the product to a shopping list and will also make sure this store is added to that list so that it will appear in the Product List Viewer. If the product is already in one of your shopping lists, then it will just add this store to that list. This is one other ways to define stores for a shopping list, more of which are discussed in the Store Selector Section.
The "shop" button on Pronto web pages redirect to product detail pages at other store's web sites (not Pronto's). If you visit a web page like this, when the page finished loading, you will see a Product Banner at the bottom of the page. On this banner will be the Shopping Helper icon you can click on to add that product to one of your lists. Alternatively, you can click the Shopping Helper's icon on the Firefox status bar to add he product.
Some stores have product detail pages that the Shopping Helper can automatically recognize. When this happens, a Product Banner will appear at the bottom of the page. On this banner will be the Shopping Helper icon you can click on to add that product to one of your lists. Alternatively, you can click the Shopping Helper's icon on the Firefox status bar to add he product.
You can disable these automatic banner notifications using the Shopping Helper Preference Pane.
For all web pages that contain information about a product, the easiest way to add this to one of your lists is to click the Shopping Helper icon on your Firefox status bar. This will open the Product Picker dialog window with the most likely product images, titles and prices from that page. Using the radio buttons, you can selected the image, title and price you want to use for this product, then click 'OK' and the shopping list selector dialog will allow you to pick one of your shopping lists.
To use the Product Picker this way requires that the page contain at least one recognizable price. Pages without any prices will alert you if you try to add them this way.
On most pages, the Product Picker will have allow you to pick the correct image, title and price, but if it is failing to pick out the correct information, you can resort to the manual method of using the Product Picker, as discussed in the Manual Adding Section below.
Once you have picked the image, title and price for a web page, whether or not you add it to s shopping list, a Product Banner will appear for that page. If you want to change how you initially defined this product, your should reload the page to clear out your previous definition, then click the status bar icon to begin the redefinition.
You should always try the Semi-automatic method of using the Product Picker to add products, but if that fails, you can resort to manually defining the image, title and price components of a product. To do this requires picking out the components in the web page directly, using the Firefox context menu and then clicking the Shopping Helper status bar icon to add the product.
The Firefox context menu is the pop-up menu that appears when you right click on a web page. The Shopping Helper has an entry near the bottom with a sub-menu that allows you to select the image, title and/or price directly by right clicking on the component. When you do this, the selected component will be highlighted. You can select one or more of the image, title and price for the product, then launch the Product Picker using the status bar icon. Any component you did not select, the Shopping Helper will try to automatically extract from the page. The context menu also provides the ability to clear out anything you previously manually marked.
Note that the Shopping Helper will do some sanity checking of the components you manually define, so will try to ensure that you are selecting valid images and prices form the pages.
Any web page that the Shopping Helper recognizes as a product detail page, it will display a Product Banner at the bottom of the page. This banner serves to show basic information about the product that the Shopping Helper knows about. Clicking the icon on the banner will add the product to a list, which can also be achieved by clicking the Shopping Helper status bar icon.
The banner may contain information fetched from Pronto's database, or might be the information you picked when adding the product. If the information comes from Pronto's database, it will often contain additional useful information about the product, such as the number of stores that sell the product and the price range.
The Automatic Product Banner Notifications can be disabled with the preference Enable automatic page banner notifications.
When viewing pages on Pronto.com, the Shopping Helper inserts its icon next to products and stores on these pages to allow you to click on the icon to add to your Shopping Lists. You can disable this feature using the Shopping Helper Preference Pane.
See the Preference Pane Section for how to access and change your Shopping Helper preference settings.