Gmail is getting a Purchases tab to help track your deliveries

Google is adding a Purchases tab to Gmail's sidebar. This might be useful if you do a lot of online shopping.

Gmail already supports order tracking since 2022. When you place an order and get a mail about it, Gmail would display a banner with some information about it at the top of your inbox. This isn't changing, it will display summary cards for packages that will arrive within 24 hours.

The new Purchases tab is designed to help you keep track of all your purchases, and delivery updates, in one place. It's not just a list that filters emails that contain order information. Gmail's Purchases View displays multiple summary cards for upcoming deliveries, if you have multiple active orders, each of those displays a thumbnail of the item, and has buttons that you can click on. Purchases are listed below the "arriving soon" cards.

If these work like the existing shortcuts, clicking the buttons should open the corresponding page on the shopping website, without opening the mail.  E.g. If you tap/click on track order in an email from Amazon, it would open the tracking page on Amazon's site/app.

This purchase tracking feature actually reminded me of an old article that Martin wrote about how Google is tracking your purchases, and that's bad for privacy. Now it's a feature. You should be able to turn off the Purchases tab from Gmail's Settings > Inbox type > Customize. That's what Google's support page for Inbox categories seems to suggest, I can't verify that until I can test the feature.

Google's announcement says that the Purchases tab is rolling out to all Google personal account users on mobile and web. I don't have it yet, but you can refer to the above image, courtesy of Google's blog.

Gmail is also getting a more relevant Promotions tab. As seen in the image below, you will be able to sort the mails in the tab by “most relevant” promotional emails. It is based on the mails that you click on, i.e. the ones that remain unread or sent straight to the bin, aren't considered important.

Google says Gmail will add helpful nudges, to alert users about upcoming deals and offers that are expiring, so they don't miss them. How do you turn this off? Well, you can disable the Promotions tab.

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post Gmail is getting a Purchases tab to help track your deliveries appeared first on gHacks Technology News.