Enhance online shopping

As brick-and-mortar stores close, the convenience and competitive pricing available through online shopping are becoming ever more important. This free Firefox add-on provides a simple tool to enhance your online shopping experience.

The buySafe Shopping Advisor installs two small buttons and a search field to your Firefox toolbars. Its searches connect to the buySafe Web site, which searches bonded merchants to provide reliable and safe shopping. This shopping search engine responded well during our tests, returning results quickly. Although it performed well on searches for apparel and shoes, pet items, woodworking tools, and electronics, we didn't have much luck for finding automotive parts. Searches for large appliances also produced some odd results: for example, entering "GE stove" returned results that included digital cameras and wireless phones.

Power shoppers will want to try out this add-on for its ease of use and the reassurance provided for the buySafe transactions. It doesn't offer complete one-stop shopping online, but it's a good start.