The ShoppingNotes blog

It’s the holidays!  ShoppingNotes.com is kicking off a Friend Referral Program — now you can get Amazon or any electronic gift cards of your choice simply by referring friends to use our price alert service.  We’ve made it super easy and it takes less than 2 minutes (see official rules here).

If you are an existing user or have received the email invitation to this Program, start inviting friends NOW and save big money together.  Otherwise, to participate, set at least one price alert on the products you want to buy using our front page or the “Save to My Shopping Notes” button, and you will receive an invitation by email, subject to availability.

Also your favorite Christian Louboutin or Prada can go on sale any minute now.  Don’t forget to come to ShoppingNotes.com to set price alerts on the products you’ve been longing for!

Happy holiday shopping!

If you’re using the newly released Internet Explorer 8, you may have seen an error message “Internet Explorer has modified this page to help prevent cross-site scripting” when using our “Save to My Shopping Notes” button. Here’s the good news—We’ve fixed this problem and everything should work the same way as before! There’s no action you need to take. Just click on the “Save to My Shopping Notes” button as usual whenever you see a product of interest. (This problem only affected Internet Explorer 8. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers had no such issue)

Special thanks to one of our users for notifying us of this issue! Please continue to let us know any problems or suggestions you have about ShoppingNotes.com. We appreciate your support.

Summer is here and lots of sales are going on right now. So head to ShoppingNotes.com to set price alerts on the items you’ve been coveting and start saving big money now!

We’ve just added a “Press” page to our website. I want to personally thank all the media that told the world about us – I swear we haven’t bribed anyone with T-shirts or Jellybeans

Redferret.net was the first site that discovered us (right after our launch!). Since then we’ve been seen in Redorbit, Inventorspot, Geeksugar, Lifehacker, CNET, MSNBC, CBS news, LA times, O the Oprah Magazine, ……

Thank you, Editors! We appreciate your help in spreading the word about us. If you ever want some Jellybeans, please do let me know.

A big thank you hug also goes to all our users for giving us suggestions, sending us bug reports, and helping us grow. We always read every email and respond as fast as we can. Please continue to support us and let us know your thoughts on how we can improve!

The ShoppingNotes.com Team

As promised, here’re the videos from “Fashion Goes Web 2.0″ Let us know if you want to be invited to one of these events next time – this time the event was completely sold out and some people that came all the way from Fresno had to be turned away.  So get in the line early!

ShoppingNotes.com Intro (by Founder Meng-You Yang) and Demo (by Evangelist Tina Cheng)

Fashion Show Part I (Joui Turandot’s creations)

Fashion Show Part II (I. B. Bayo’s creations)

Tell us who your favorite model is!!!

First, go to the product that you want to watch price on (for example, Mario Kart Wii with Wii wheel), copy the URL.

Then, go to ShoppingNotes, paste the URL into the top box. Enter your email address in the box below. Click on “Get Alerts“. 

If you’ve never used ShoppingNotes before, you’ll receive an email requesting email verification.  Open up that email, click on “Activate Alerts“.

Once you do that, you’ll see the product image, description and price retrieved for you. This demonstrates that we can successfully retrieve the information from the URL link you’ve provided. You can be certain that any price change will be monitored and you’ll be the first one to know!

Please note that the URL you enter needs to be the URL of one particular product (not the entire TV section of bestbuy.com), and it needs to have a price listed on that product page (otherwise there’s no way for us to watch its price change).

To save the hassle of copying and pasting URLs everytime, you can install the Shoppingnotes bookmarklet and set price alerts using the bookmarklet following these instructions.

I’m using this post as a central location for all the FAQs I’ve written.

Here’s the Firefox user version: (I’ll be posting the IE user version in a different post)

When you’re on a product page at an online store, simply click on the “Save to my ShoppingNotes” button on your toolbar:

If you haven’t already signed in, you’ll see the screen below.  (For those who don’t have a ShoppingNotes account, we encourage you to sign up for one. It only takes 30 seconds, and gives you the benefit of accessing your ShoppingNotes from anywhere. If you click on  “Continue without Signing Up” , you’ll be able to save the product into a temporary account, which resides only on this computer you’re using now).  

After you’ve signed in, you can save the product into your personal ShoppingNotes by clicking on “Save”.  I usually do two things before I click on “Save”, first is to click on the radio button next to “Alert me whenever the price changes” (so I’ll get an email when price changes), second is to select the list that I want the product to go under and click on “Add” (this makes my life easier since I have a lot of products in my ShoppingNotes).

Once you click on “Save”, the product (image, description, price and link) will be saved into your ShoppingNotes in a few seconds.  Now you can either go take a look at your ShoppingNotes by clicking on the “Go To My ShoppingNotes” button or just sit back and let it automatically go back to the original product page you were on.

This is how your ShoppingNotes will look like after you’ve saved this product.  The product you just saved is on the very top.

What I’m calling a “button” is actually a bookmarklet. It allows you to save anything you see on the web into ShoppingNotes in just two clicks.

For Firefox, it’s really easy to place this button on the toolbar and takes only 5 seconds, just follow instructions here. If you want to know how to save a product into ShoppingNotes using Firefox, please see illustrations in my previous post.

For Internet Explorer, it’ll take about 30 seconds to put it on your toolbar. Please refer to the illustrations below:

Go to the Install page, right click on “Save to My ShoppingNotes” link, then select “Add to Favorites” from the pull-down menu.

After you do this, two windows will pop up, just click on “Yes” and “OK“.

Then you’ll see a window letting you select where you want to put the “Save to My Shoppingnotes” link into. To make your life easier, select the “Links” folder, then click “OK”.

To see the “Save to My Shoppingnotes” on your toolbar, all you need is to check you toolbar settings under “View” (on the Internet Explorer top menu bar). Make sure “Links” is checked. And if you want to move “Links” to a different place on your toolbar, make sure you unlock the toolbar first so you can move things around. Don’t forget to lock your toolbar after you’ve moved the “Save to My ShoppingNotes” to where you want.

Done!!!  Now everytime you want to save a product into your shoppingnotes, just click on the “Save to My ShoppingNotes” button!

You can save any many products into your ShoppingNotes as you want. (I have over 300 items in my ShoppingNotes)

To save any product into your ShoppingNotes, please refer to the step-by-step illustrations I’ve written for Firefox and IE.

Within your ShoppingNotes you can create lists (such as “Household items” or “Back to school”), copy or move any item to a list, delete an item (from your list or your entire ShoppingNotes) and refresh price (retrieves the most up-to-date price on any product from its original website).

You can also sort your products in the order of price, time saved, website name or favorite level. 

Below is an illustration of each function. Please click to enlarge.

To set price alert on a product you have saved in your ShoppingNotes, just click on the “Set Alert” button next to the price.  You can choose to receive alert for any price change or have us notify you only when the price drops below a number (entered by you).  The alert will be active for a maximum of 30 days.  Near the end of the 30 days, you’ll get an email reminding you of the alert you have set.  There’s a big “Renew” button in the email, click once on that button will renew your alerts for another 30 days.