Google is bringing price tracking and deal alerts direct to Chrome for Android, with alerts in your browser when prices drop.
Online shopping has – albeit to the detriment of the high street – been a great leveller in terms of giving shoppers access to the best products at the best prices. When you're looking to buy anything from a vacuum cleaner to a car, the web gives you a way to compare prices from numerous shops and sellers without having to leave home.
But while online deal hunting can save you shoe leather, manually checking prices on dozens and dozens of websites can be hugely time-consuming. To help with this, Google is bringing a new feature to Android that's very similar to one that used to be found in the now-dead Google Shopping app, letting you monitor prices and spot deals as soon as they appear.
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The first of the new features, Price Tracking, gives you the option of monitoring the prices of items you have open in tabs in Chrome on your Android phone (or tablet, for that matter). If you have several tabs open from your browsing for potential purchases, this should give you an easy way to monitor the prices from the tab screen. We'll have to see precisely how this pans out, as it seem the function is still rolling out.
The second feature is another money saver, and the idea behind the deal alert is very simple. It can be difficult to know exactly when to buy certain items as the price could drop at any time. So, if there's something you're not in a burning rush to get, you can hold off making a purchase and wait for a deal alert to come through, letting you know of a price drop via an in-browser alert.
Browse and save
It's always a good idea to keep your web browser up to date; not only does it mean that you have all of the latest security and performance improvements, but you also get access to the very latest features such as this. The two money-saving tools above can be found in Chrome 90, so you will need to grab the latest update from Google Play. You should see the new options when you head to the tabs screen and tap the three-dot menu.
Even when you've updated the app, you may still need to use the following steps to manually enable the features:
- Launch Chrome and pay a visit to chrome://flags/#enable-tab-grid-layout
- Tap the button to display the options menu and then select Enabled Price notifications
- Close and relaunch Chrome (you may need to do this twice)
Via Android Police
