Share your thoughts on how you shop online!

[mozillapm]

Hello Firefox Community! 

I’m Joy, a member of the Firefox Product team. I’m excited to engage with you on Mozilla Connect and learn more about your experiences shopping online on Firefox. 

Our team is working on ways to support and enhance your online shopping experience, from the moment you start thinking about shopping for something, to researching different options, to purchasing with confidence. We would love to hear your thoughts on how we could make Firefox even better for shopping, particularly in how we can help ensure you feel safe, secure, and in control while shopping online. 

We welcome all ideas, big or small, and are open to discussing everything from blue-sky concepts to smaller improvements we could make in your current browser experience. 

I’ll be checking this thread a few times each week and am looking forward to your feedback. Thanks so much for helping us make Firefox even better!

[myspace]

Price comparisons and coupon finding is helpful. Especially if it took into account available promo codes to find best final deal.

[MarcusW]

> We would love to hear your thoughts on how we could make Firefox even better for shopping
JUST DON'T.

[bgbloedel]

Hello, Joy. This is feedback on my recent attempt to complete a purchase on Amazon using Firefox. Everything went well until I got to the Complete Purchase step. The page went blank, and would not load the purchase confirmation page. Brought up MS Edge to complete the purchase. This sort of thing happens often enough to be a concern for Firefox.

[letenacio]

Hello, I hope I am not 'necroing' this thread too hard, but I thought it would be better to contribute to an existing thread.

I attempted to move from Brave to Firefox recently and found the credit card autofill on mobile to be essentially nonfunctional. I had to physically go and find my credit card 3 times within 48 hours and found it completely unusable. For me, given the security of credit cards and my ability to work with credit card companies on fraud, convenience and accessibility far outweigh security. I want my browser to autofill my credit card incredibly easily. I moved back to Brave immediately, despite it being an inferior browser, due to this issue. 

[Jon]

Oh not at all @letenacio - this is good feedback, keep it coming! Will also share this with our credential management team. 

[Isabella]

Hi there,

My name is Isabella and - I'm a product manager at Mozilla working on credential management (which includes credit card autofill). We're continually working on improving the feature so I would love to learn more about the issues you were having. A couple of follow up questions for you:

(1) Were you trying to use credit card autofill on iOS or Android?

(2) Do you recall the sites you tried to use it on?

(3) Do you remember when you encountered these issues?

Thanks in advance!

[Boobieta]

Hi, could be a bug. Have you ever considered third party apps like proton pass? Never fails me.

You can file bugs in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home

Describe what you did, what happened etc, it's possible someone else had the same issue and already reported, when you write the keywords, you'll see if anyone else did, if they did you can jump in to reinforce.

[okocop]

I only use Firefox for shopping because...  I tried many browsers - firefox turned out to be more convenient (and safer) for me,
 1 .  When I want to buy something, I look through dozens of online stores and products, I bookmark the products I like.  firefox has built in bookmarks very wonderfully, I have more than 1000 of them .. and it's cool because firefox allows you to sort, delete, and rename them,
 2. then I look again (the “search” function among the bookmarks - I enter the “needed details”) and a list of products with this “details” appears - This is so cool!  Thanks firefox
 3. Built-in password manager, another tasty plus is its protection with a master password, oh, this is great!  It's so cool!  Thanks firefox.. Colleagues at work cannot use a shared computer - my passwords are because they are protected by a master password, that's cool!!!  Thanks firefox!!!
 4, I use the built-in password manager to log into online store sites.
 5, BUT when I chose a product - and decided to buy it, I add it to the cart, etc., at the time of purchase - for security, I use exclusively the Local  password manager like "keepass", this is old stuff, but how cool it is (!) and very safe, because its keys can be stored anywhere, locally, on a flash drive, or in the cloud.  And I don’t trust cloud password managers, clouds can be faked and redirected to a “shadow copy of the deceiver’s site” and you may send your requests for card data and codes to the cloud (to no one knows), the cloud (of any well-known company) can also block your access for any reason - failure, accident, non-payment of a wild amount of subscription fees, sanctions, etc.
 use local password managers, I recommend, you yourself manage what is valuable to you - on the local disk, and copies on a flash drive, and also on CDRW.  archives
 6, that's cool!
 7, I enter the card details and codes, at the moment of entering the payment card details, I deliberately manually turn off the Internet, usually only when the Internet is turned off, i.e.  I entered the data from "pass manager" into the payment form in the current site form in the browser window, - and immediately turned on the Internet connection again, I recommend!!  
 8. And it’s very cool that Firefox allows you to have additional application extensions, like notes (which can be saved when you exit the browser) and have them at hand again when to run browser again. This is usefull for making notes about the delivery time of a purchase, address, car, bonus details to purchase..
 9. After payment I wait for the purchase.
 / *  I really love firefox / mozila, since 2000

[tilwiti]

Personally, I strive to leave the store page as soon as possible. Before buying, I research many sources to find the best option. This creates a lot of tabs. I wish I could browse through them all at the same time like PiP but for pages or many pages in one window.

[Jon]

This is interesting - PiP for shopping to reduce tab clutter. Thanks for sharing!

[ChasUK2]

When shopping online I sometimes want to have even up to 40 tabs for different sites. I want to be able to always open a new tap immediately to the right of my current tab. Firefox used to do this now even with all the suggested tweaks in place it often opens the new tab somewhere down the line. Maybe at end, maybe after something opened previously.

On a site such as ebay with 40 tabs open adding a new one from the search sometimes it doesn't put that tab in at all or it can be nearly anywhere to the right. Makes it very difficult to use Firefox of this type of product comparison shopping.

[Emmic]

if firefox had an integrated adblock that also blocked "promoted" search results (like etsy has, for example), that would improve my online shopping experience.

otherwise firefox already does what I want a browser to do when shopping online. it has tabs and lets me turn off saving my logins and card info. what more could you want? it's a browser, not a personal shopper.

[MC2]

Brave is our browser of choice for the reasons set forth here: https://privacytests.org/

I am visiting the forum today because I still use and support Thunderbird (though we are looking to migrate away after two decades because they killed theming & zebra stripes, and it wont support clickable Zoom links from some correspondents like Mac Mail and Microsoft Outlook do).

I think that this shopping idea is an act of desperation on the part of Mozilla, and it will not do much to improve Firefox market share.  But after all of the criminal corruption scandals and customer abuse at ebay, I do think that company needs to lose market share too — and the best way to accomplish that is to create a "purchasing assistant" desktop app that will search for a product across all selected e-commerce sites and sort the results by some chosen criteria, so ebay no longer has a competitive edge.  If that is a project which Mozilla would like to manage, I would be happy to support & promote it.  However, I have not been impressed with the accuracy of FakeSpot — particularly the fact that good products with 20k-40k reviews are rated as “D” [e.g. Sandisk/Samsung] and the lack of response from developers.

[Garymoore]

it's wonderful to hear that Firefox is focusing on enhancing the online shopping experience! Security and ease of use are really important to me, so I'm excited about any improvements that make shopping smoother and safer. I'm eager to see how Firefox will evolve to help us feel more secure and confident while shopping online. Thanks for considering our feedback!

[GaryS37]

I shop online a lot. (If I miss a day, I'm afraid Amazon will send someone on a wellness check!) In addition to Amazon, I shop directly with two specialty toothpaste companies, a few CBD outlets, Walmart, Swanson Vitamins, Staples, and a few assorted others. It's pretty darn seamless on Firefox. I especially enjoy the almost automatic saving of Username/Password and the ability to look up Passwords, History, etc.--although History is sometimes quite incomplete, especially websites I found via Google Search. I wish Microsoft would stop butting in with attempts to coax me into using their Edge browser and infernal Bing search engine. Ditto for Yahoo.

Only problem I can think off right now is that, lately, when I have been away from the computer for a while, with the monitor off or just resting, when I return all or most of the shortcuts on the bottom have disappeared from sight. They're still there, but I have to guess where to find them.

[BlueIronKnuckle]

What if Firefox could "meta" shopping sites?  I go to a page in Firefox, request what I want, and then order it from there, no matter who it is from.  For example, I go to a shopping "plugin" and look for toothpaste.  it automatically searches Walgreens, Amazon, CVS, etc, and then I buy it at the best price, right there.  I no longer have to visit a dozen different websites, I choose what I want, and Firefox will go order it for me from wherever.

[Blisterexe]

the only useful thing i can think of Firefox doing is showing price history, other than that id prefer that things like coupon hunting to stay on extensions

[ThePillenwerfer]

I don't think there's anything that Firefox could do to improve my on-line shopping as most of the annoyances are the result of poorly designed web-sites and ones with poor search functions — yes, Amazon (UK), I'm looking at you.

[greenbird]

Incorporating AI into the core browser will make me feel actively unsafe using Firefox to shop. If AI is analyzing my browsing patterns, and presumably feeding the data back into its LLM in order to provide more accurate suggestions, I have little reason to trust my financial information and passwords will not be at risk.

[Erwan62]

The best way to ensure a good experience:

Made sure that Firefox will never record, even locally, my habits and personal information.

Besides, what does this function enable in my settings? : "browser.shopping.experience2023.active"="true"

I have not authorized anything relating to this.

[lilly]

Hello,

As an avid Firefox user and frequent online shopper, I really appreciate that Mozilla is focusing on enhancing the shopping experience. One of the most important aspects for me when shopping online is feeling safe and secure, particularly with my personal data and payment information. Features like tracking protection and enhanced privacy controls on Firefox already make me feel more confident while browsing, but there's always room for improvement.

Here are a few ideas that could make Firefox even better for online shopping:

1. Integrated Price Comparisons: It would be great if Firefox could provide a built-in tool to compare prices across multiple websites while shopping. This could save time and help ensure that we're getting the best deals without having to rely on third-party extensions.

2. Discount & Coupon Alerts: A feature that automatically suggests or applies available coupons at checkout would be fantastic. Similar to how some browser extensions work, Firefox could scan for valid promo codes or sales for the site we're shopping on.

3. Safe Payment Assistant: A feature that helps users securely save and manage multiple payment options, while ensuring encryption and protection against phishing attempts, would increase confidence when making online purchases.

4. Visual Search: Sometimes I see an item and want to search for it online but don’t know what it's called. An integrated visual search could help users find products easily by uploading or capturing an image.

In addition, I love supporting local businesses, and I’ve often shopped at websites like The Linen House for home goods. It would be great if Firefox could recognize and support local shops by promoting secure, verified, and region-specific businesses when we’re shopping online.

Thanks for opening this conversation, and I look forward to seeing how Firefox evolves!

Best,
lilly