As the Shopping Helper refreshes the product data in your Shopping Lists, it will compare the current product data with the previous data to provide Product Alerts when it detects changes of interest.
When new alerts are generated, an icon appears on the Firefox status bar next to the Shopping Helper icon to indicate the most recent alert events. The icon will periodically pulse in color as a visual attractor to notify you of the new alerts. Clicking on the icon will open a dialog displaying the latest alerts. You can disable these status bar alert notifications by right-clicking on the icon and choosing to disable this feature.
In addition to the always-present status-bar icon, a periodic "alert slider" will appear to notify you of newly arrived product alerts. The interval this reminds you can be adjusted or disabled completely using the Shopping Helper Preference Pane. The alert slider is not supported on all platforms, and its specific behavior is platform-dependent.
Note that the product data used by the Shopping Helper comes from automated web crawlers and the alerts may occasionally reflect idiosyncrasies of the crawling software.
When viewing alerts by clicking the status bar icon, you only see the most recently arriving alerts. These alerts accumulate and can be viewed in the Sidebar. The Shopping Helper will only alert you once for a product until you have acknowledged and cleared the alerts for that product. Right-clicking in the sidebar area and choosing 'Clear All Alerts' is the way to signal to the Shopping Helper that you have seen the alert and want to be alerted to any future changes to that product.
Price Alerts occur when the Shopping Helper detects a significant change in the price offered by a store. This includes both decreases and increases in price. You may adjust this threshold in the Preference Pane.
For products that are sold by more then one store, the Shopping Helper will also alert you if the minimum price across all stores has changed.
Product availability alerts are triggered as a product goes in and out of a store's stock. An alert is also triggered if a product newly becomes available at one of the stores in your Favorite Store Lists.
Note that most of the product availability alerts are based on what the store is telling Pronto.com's servers. It is not uncommon for a store to still be stocking a product, but not providing that product to Pronto.com's index for some period of time. To find out for sure, you can visit the store's URL for that product to see what the store itself is showing.
The Preference Pane allows you to:
See the Preference Pane Section for how to access and change your Shopping Helper preference settings.