Shopping Lists

A Shopping List is a group of products you are interested in actively tracking. Additionally, each Shopping List has an associated set of stores which is the set of stores whose prices or page links you are interested in tracking for these products. Note that the lists you can keep on Pronto.com's web site are a more general grouping of products, brands and stores that could represent a Shopping List, but may not be groups of products you are actively shopping for. The section below on Pronto.com List Interactions explains how to import/export Shopping Lists from/to Pronto.com lists.

You can keep any number of shopping lists, where a shopping list is any collection of products and stores you add to the list. There are many ways to add products to your lists as discussed in the Adding Products Section. The initial set of stores for each list are generated automatically, though you can then manually add and remove stores using the Store Selector.

You can view the products in your lists and manage them by opening the Shopping Helper Sidebar. The sidebar only shows the products defined for each list. To see a full view of the list, complete with the stores and prices use the Product List Viewer.

Pronto.com List Interactions

If you have an account on Pronto.com, you will be able to create and store lists using your Pronto.com user account. The Shopping Helper provides the ability to import those lists and export your local Shopping Helper lists to Pronto.com. To import or export lists you must have an account and be logged into the Pronto.com web site.

Note that the lists on Pronto.com are more general product groupings that can represent things like your favorite comedy movies, your favorite exercise equipment, etc. Additionally, you can mix and match brands and stores in your Pronto.com lists. The Shopping Helper lists are meant to be more dynamic and represent things you are actively shopping for. Thus, importing your list of favorite comedy movies from your Pronto.com list is not going to provide much utility for you.

Importing Pronto.com Lists

If you have created a list on Pronto.com and would like to import it as a Shopping List to allow you to get all the Shopping Helper capabilities, right-click the Shopping Helper icon on the Firefox status bar and choose "Import Pronto.com Lists". This will retrieve all your Pronto.com lists, then provide you with a dialog that allows you to select which list(s) you want to import. Once imported, you will be able to get Product Alerts, keep Price Histories and use the Shopping List Viewer on these lists.

Exporting Shopping Helper Lists

If you right-click an existing Shopping List in the Shopping Helper Sidebar, you can choose "Export list to Pronto.com" to copy this list's products to a Pronto.com list of the same name.

Updating Lists from Pronto.com

Once you have either imported or exported a list, the Pronto.com and the Shopping Helper lists are closely associated. You can differentiate which lists have a corresponding list on Pronto.com by its icon in the Shopping Helper Sidebar:

If you make all your list changes using Shopping Helper, then your Pronto.com list will reflect these changes. If you make changes to your Pronto.com lists without using the Shopping Helper, you can update your Shopping Helper version of the list by selecting "Update Lists from Pronto.com" by right-clicking the list name in the Shopping Helper Sidebar. This will update all Shopping Helper lists with a known Pronto.com list association, though it first will show you a dialog with the actions needed (if any) to update your Shopping Helper list.

Pronto.com List Limitations

At this time, only the first page of products on your Pronto.com lists can be imported. Pronto.com lists can be very large, and the Shopping Helper lists are meant for smaller, more dynamic shopping lists. Additionally, any brand or store you have in a Pronto.com list is ignored on importing, since the Shopping Helper lists focuses on the products. Finally, any product in a Pronto.com list that was added using the Pronto Bookmarklet is also ignored, since these lack some information required for Shopping Helper list products.

Product Lists Preferences

When opening links to product pages from the Shopping Helper sidebar, you are initially given the choice of opening the link in the current window or a new window. You can change this choice in the Shopping Helper Preference Pane using the option 'Load product bookmarks in new windows'.

All the products in your shopping lists will have their prices refreshed every 'N' hours. In the Preference Pane, you can adjust the minimum price age (in hours) to define when to to trigger the refresh. This does not guarantee they get refreshed this often, but puts a lower bound on the refresh frequency. If there are a lot of products to refresh, refreshing could be less frequent than this value, since the rate that products are refreshed is fairly moderate.

See the Preference Pane Section for how to access and change your Shopping Helper preference settings.