Another fall, another shopping season. Ahead of the holidays this year, Google announced it’s making a couple of additions to Gmail to make it easier to keep track of your purchases and potential savings, including a tab that finally keeps all of your incoming deliveries organized in one neat place.
While you’ll still see “packages that are set to arrive within 24 hours at the top of your primary inbox,” if you want a birds eye view of all your incoming deliveries, at least for accounts tied to your Gmail, that’s what Gmail’s new “Purchases” tab is for. On both mobile and on the web, you’ll find it in the left hand vertical pane, next to buttons like “Important” and “Sent.” Clicking it will show you a “simple, organized” list of any packages you’re set to get soon, with tracking and “more details” buttons next to each. Scrolling down a bit will then let you manually sort through all your purchase-related emails, including receipts and delivery updates, so you can also keep tabs on any packages that are further out, or just more easily see the data Google is using to populate your packages list. Here’s what it’ll look like.
Credit: Google
It’s similar to Gmail’s existing order-tracking feature, but while that would automatically use your packages’ tracking information to pepper updates into your main feed, this collects all package and delivery-related information into one spot, so you don’t lose it. Google says it’ll start rolling this feature out globally today, so expect to get to try it out soon.
As for purchases you haven’t made yet, Google’s also making a small tweak to its existing “Promotions” tab. The company said that, soon, you’ll be able to sort it by offers Gmail thinks are “most relevant” to you. You’ll also supposedly get helpful “nudges” to highlight upcoming and time-sensitive deals, although Google didn’t say what these would look like.
The company also didn’t say how exactly it would determine which offers are relevant to you, although it did mention that the feature will prioritize brands “you engage with the most.”
The optimist in me wants to believe this could be useful, although the realist knows that I mostly never visit the Promotions tab anyway. It’s just too ad-centric, and while I appreciate it keeping those emails away from the rest of my inbox, that’s about all I like about it. This sounds like more of the same to me, with a potential side of data collection and additional junk notifications. I’ve reached out to Google for more details on how sorting the Promotions tab by “most relevant” works, but in the meantime, the company has said you’ll still be able to sort by “most recent” instead, if you prefer the Promotions tab as it exists now.
I’ll update this post with answers once I hear back, but in the meantime, you do have a bit longer to prepare for this change. Google says that the Promotions tab update is set to start rolling out “in the coming weeks,” and even then, only on mobile.
