Google Shopping expanding to including price tracking, comparisons

Google Shopping is arguably one of the most helpful services offered by the company. I mean sure, it lets a mega-corporation that’s already capable of tracking every one of your online moves and interactions but it’s also just so handy to search for a product you’re looking for and have Google organise all them into a convenient list so you don’t have to open all those tabs and sift through every market place that might stock what you’re looking for. It’s an efficient tool that will no doubt begin seeing more use when Black Friday and the holidays after hit soon after. So it’s a good thing that Google is expanding on Shopping’s functionality by adding price tracking and comparisons to the list of available features.

This new Price Insights tool is incredibly useful for consumers looking for the best possible deal on anything they’re looking for. While plenty of services and websites already offer similar functionality, by baking those kinds of statistics into Google itself the company has eliminated the need to go to a third-party site. While I’m sure this will no doubt ruffle some feathers (and maybe even be another complaint against the company still under-going anti-trust investigations) there’s not doubt that the process of price tracking has become far easier.

What does this mean for Google Shopping?

The best use for price tracking is telling Google to keep an eye on a specific product and send a notification when the price for it drops on any website, which is great to ensure you always know when you’re able to get a solid discount. Of course, if you don’t want to track anything specific, you could just use Google Shopping to run a comparison between prices of different stores.

Oh, and the other thing that Google Shopping is adding is a pickup notification setting. So now you can figure out what online stores offer delivery or on-street pick up. It’s still quite relevant even though many people seem to think the pandemic is winding down so it’s at least a decent little feature to include in Google Shopping.

(Source: Engadget)