We’ve all been there.
You decide it's finally time to upgrade your home office setup. You want a new 4K monitor. Next thing you know, your browser looks like a barcode.
You have 12 tabs open on Amazon, 8 on Best Buy, a handful on Walmart, and a few sketchy eBay listings just for good measure. You're bouncing between tabs, trying to compare refresh rates, shipping costs, and price drops. Maybe you even spin up a Notion board or an Excel spreadsheet just to keep track of it all.
It’s exhausting. Shopping shouldn't feel like a Jira sprint.
I got so frustrated with losing track of products, prices, and open tabs that I decided to scratch my own itch.
Meet CommonCart: the universal browser extension that lets you save, organize, and compare products from any store, all in one local dashboard.
🛑 The "50-Tab" Problem
Before CommonCart, my workflow was terrible. If I wanted to buy a new mechanical keyboard, I had to keep tabs open indefinitely out of fear that I'd lose the link to that one specific Keychron variant on a random site. Bookmarking them cluttered my browser, and adding them to site-specific "Wishlists" meant I had to check 5 different websites to see where it was cheapest.
✨ The Solution: One Cart to Rule Them All
I built CommonCart as a discrete extension that floats on product pages. Instead of leaving a tab open, you just click the "Add to CommonCart" button.
Instantly, the extension scrapes the Title, Image, Price, and Link, and drops it into a unified dashboard.
Here is what I focused on building to make it actually useful:
💰 Real Side-by-Side Comparisons (The Game Changer)
Saving links is great, but comparing them is better. I recently pushed a premium comparison tool. You can select an item from Amazon, one from Best Buy, and one from Target. CommonCart puts them side-by-side and automatically highlights the best deal, even handling different currencies smartly.🌍 Truly Universal (No Store Left Behind)
A wishlist tool is useless if it only works on three sites. I wrote custom, context-safe parsers for Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Etsy, Home Depot, Flipkart, and more. (Dev note: I recently updated all parsers to utilize the activeTab URL as a fallback, meaning even if the DOM structure changes or the UI block fails, the manual capture still securely grabs the data you need!)🔒 Local-First & Privacy Focused
As developers, we hate spyware. CommonCart doesn't require an account to start using it. It doesn't track your search history. Your data stays in your browser's local storage. You only track what you explicitly click "Save" on.🤝 Seamless Sharing for Group Buys & Wishlists
What if you're building a PC part list or creating a birthday wishlist? I wanted sharing to be frictionless without requiring user accounts. I integrated Firebase and a robust REST API for Manifest V3 so you can generate a Share Code (like X7K9P2). Anyone with your code can instantly import and preview your entire collection.
🛠️ What's under the hood?
If you're curious about the tech stack, CommonCart is built heavily entirely around Modern Web standards. Some of the recent technical challenges I tackled included:
- Manifest V3 compliance: Navigating the tight restrictions of MV3 for real-time Firebase syncing without relying on persistent background pages.
- Theme-Aware Tokens: Building an accessible, high-contrast UI system tailored for users who need it (complete with Ocean, Forest, and High contrast dark modes).
- Robust Parsing: Emulating real-world constructor injections in my parsers to handle the messy, ever-changing DOMs of massive e-commerce sites.
Stop Shopping Harder. Shop Smarter.
If you are constantly drowning in tabs while trying to find the best deal on tech, home goods, or gifts, give it a try. It’s 100% free.
I'm actively developing this and would love to hear what the Dev.to community thinks! Let me know if there are any specific stores you want parsed next or features you'd love to see.
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