Share your thoughts on how you shop online!

[mozillajoy]

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!

[smuch]

An option I like when shopping is the ability to set up schedued deliveries for products I use on a regular basis.

Presently I mostly shop online with Amazon for delivery and sometimes local store sites for items such as hardware and food.

Thank you for asking.

[mozillajoy]

Thanks for the note, smuch. How might you see yourself using tools and capabilities in Firefox browser to help with your item delivery setup or local item shopping?

[smuch]

mozillaJoy, Firefox tools and capabilities already satisfy my limited amount of online shopping. 

[syntobu]

It's hard to think of anything that I would want always built into firefox. "shopping" features are always overly intrusive, and immediately make me think that someone is stealing / selling my data.

[rarula]

I believe, Firefox should be a tool to display web pages. I don't want to be bothered by my browser concerning "shopping experiences". But when I really want to go shopping online, I would use my browser to contact a shopping site, like Amazon.
So I believe in separation of duties:
Firefox to display web pages
Shopping sites to provide the content and "experience" (when asked for).

[Meem55]

I go to a site, place my order there, pay and the order is send to me.
I'm not sure how FF could help me with this? It's the site itself that provides the shopping environment and everything surrounding that.

[XenonofArcticus]

I'm frustrated by shopping sites that feel it's ok to manipulate search results, or just generally provide terrible search results for whatever reason.

I've made a specific request here:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/re-filter-amazon-and-ebay-search-results-to-conform-to-user-s/i...

But overall, I want a way to find the products I want quickly and at a good value. I want to be able to find them and be confident I've found the right thing.

If I want a "wind up Winnie the Pooh", I don't want to see a bunch of "Winnie the Pooh Wind Chimes", or Winnie the Pooh accessories. I'm fine with seeing "you may also like" sometimes, but when I'm searching for a specific thing, I want my shopping platforms to respect my search. So many platforms now don't respect the subtractive search operator like "-chime" to eliminate wind "chimes". It seems they feel it's in their best interests to shows us what THEY want us to buy, not what we want to buy.

Sites like DigiKey and McMaster are amazing because they characterize everything about their products and you can accurately search. AliExpress is the worst, where you put in a search string and then it vomits up uncategorized stuff. If I only want item X in a metal material, I should be able to filter for that. If I only want it in red, or in a pattern not a solid, please help me with that. If I only want to see results from credible sellers, not YGTHRUP or whatever the latest Chinese Amazon vendor is, let me do that. If I want to sort by best match AND lowest price, then let me. I don't want to see non-matching cheap stuff just because I choose lowest price. And I wdon't want to see the sponsored most expensive stuff for the first 5 pages just because I chose best match.

Google revolutionized the Internet by making Search good. And then they ruined it for money.

Please bring product search to a useable state again, whether it's on one site or across the Internet.

[smuch]

I agree and I think open shopping search is a risk in a browser. I don't want to a shopper profile associated with me. 

Future searches should not bring up Winnie the Pooh when I am shopping for pet food or wind chimes, for example.

I think private browsing should address that but I just shop in Amazon because I trust their site. 

[Synchro]

Hello. I think I have two concerns when I shop online or, more broadly speaking, when I use my credit card online:

1. I don't want sites to remember my credit card information. They like to place flagged check-boxes like "remember this card", they say this will help me in the future, it will be easy for me not to enter my card information next time etc. But I feel calmer knowing that as few people possess this information as possible. It isn't difficult for me to spend 30 seconds to fill the lines. So maybe Firefox could check whether the service is going to remember my card or not.
2. Some services provide subscriptions. So I want to be sure that I won’t buy a subscription by mistake when I want to purchase something for one time. This is also relevant for charity. So maybe Firefox could check how often the service is going to take my money: once, or every week, or every month...

[Jon]

Really like that second point - I have definitely signed up for a subscription instead of a one-time purchase by mistake, and it's a hassle remembering to cancel before the next shipment/credit card charge. How do you see Firefox checking that and notifying you? 

[Synchro]

Unfortunately I am not very good at how IT things work and how Firefox can or cannot interact with websites. I mean both technically and ethically. But as a user I can imagine something like a warning pop-up message “You will be charged now and also on the dd.mm.yyyy” or “Be aware: this is not a one-time purchase”. Or maybe Firefox can find on a page and somehow highlight the text telling me how often the site is going to take my money (I hope sites usually indicates this).

[mozillajoy]

Thanks for sharing, Synchro! I am curious if you've found solutions for either these two concerns, or if your current workaround is just to enter your card info each time and check your bank account occasionally for unwanted charges.

Also curious if you could envision using something in Firefox that would help manage your card info for you, rather than the site you're shopping with.

[Synchro]

Yes, just as you said. I can check my profile in the site to find out whether it remembered my card data or not. If I was inattentive and the site remembered it, this can also be disclosed during my next purchase. And as for unwanted charges, I believe only regular checking of the bank account can help now.

I can imagine, for example, that Mozilla could create a totally new service which would become a mediator between my bank and a payee. So that it would block payments untill I approve them. But I understand it's a really huge work and a non-core project for you.

(This is the 3rd time I try to post this reply...)

[okay_okay]

Thanks for asking. I send a lot of individual links, especially around the holiday season, for gift ideas. It would be nice to be able to group the links (or tabs) together and share them that way. Or maybe there's a better way to do this already and I haven't figured it out.

[PatchMixolydic]

+1 for shopping through websites, not through the browser. I really don't see a need for any shopping-related features in Firefox, and the sight of shopping-related prefs creeping into a dev build (`browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.enabled` especially) honestly makes me wonder if switching from Ungoogled Chromium to Firefox was the right choice.

[lackey]

I do not want my shopping habits to be tracked or known to Mozilla. I do not want the browser to come pre-installed with something to "help" me with my shopping habits, even if it can be disabled.

Two of Firefox's greatest strengths are user choice and privacy; I care about those virtues and want to see them supported.

If Mozilla happens to make a shopping product such as Fakespot, I believe users should be able to choose to install it as an extension based on its own merit.

[lackey]

This Bugzilla page chronicles something that's being built in to Firefox: a shopping helper that is capable of injecting ads (or at least ad text) into shopping websites.

Is this the better web this pinned post is asking about?