The holiday season is rapidly approaching, and with it come the days of the best deals on virtually everything. Black Friday is right around the corner, and with it come the biggest discounts of the year. However, you can already grab a lot of interesting stuff for much less, such as these seven weird gadgets that are already on sale.
Of course, you’re not only browsing deals just to find something cool to buy – sometimes you have an item in mind that you’re specifically searching for or need to upgrade in your home. You can already find great deals on the best smartphones, or maybe snatch an awesome smart home accessory for a fraction of the price. Even though bargain hunting is often quite fun, it can also be a bit challenging. To find the best offers, you often have to sift through a lot of listings, making the task time-consuming.
Of course, you can use various tools to help you find the best prices, but it is still quite a messy affair. That’s where Google comes in with its newest slew of tools that are designed to help you shop. These new features will not only make it easier to find interesting products to buy as gifts, but will also let you find them at the best possible price.
Shopping for deals can be difficult for multiple reasons. That’s why you often need quite a lot of specialized tools in order to make your bargain hunting more efficient and effective. Google evidently recognized this, as the company, just before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, introduced four new features that will help you shop:
- A new Deals destination in Search
- Discounts section in Chrome
- Price insights in Chrome
- New price tracking options and specialized Shopping List bookmarks folder
Google’s shopping portfolio grew extensively with this feature drop. All of these tools are designed to solve some of the biggest difficulties when bargain hunting online, and when used together they should be a great help with all your holiday (and beyond) shopping.
What do these new features help you with?
Google really went all-in this holiday season with improvements to its shopping experience – and for good reason. Online shopping, especially around the holidays, can be quite frustrating. Even though it is much more laid-back than the old-fashioned, in-store shopping at the height of the season, online shopping brings with it its own set of difficulties and challenges.
Probably the biggest one is the sheer number of sites and offers you have to skim through. Even if you know exactly what you want to buy, you can find the same item in dozens, if not hundreds, of online stores. What’s more, each store may sell it at a different price, or have some hidden coupons or discount codes, making it cheaper than anywhere else. You just need some help to keep track of all of this.
Jason Cipriani / Pocket-lint
The other problem that Google is trying to solve with its set of shopping tools is the rapid nature of online discounts. Physical stores usually set up a promotion for a set number of days – or until they run out of discounted items. Online, you can see sales that last just for a few hours or even minutes, making them highly desirable, but rather elusive. Getting a notification when one of these comes up is great if you’re looking for the absolute best prices.
Lastly, the holiday season is also, unfortunately, a time when some shady stores try to take advantage of their customers looking for good deals on presents for their family or friends. Increasing prices just to create fake discounts is a well-known tactic, but one that is still going strong among some of the less-reputable stores. That’s why tools that check pricing history are so popular – something keeping track of the normal prices of an item can help you not only save some money but also protect you from getting scammed and giving your hard-earned money to a deceitful seller. So, without further ado, here are all the new tools and features and where you can find them before this upcoming deals season:
A new ‘Deals’ destination in Search
One of the biggest difficulties when bargain hunting is, well, finding bargains. It’s true that, especially around the holidays, you can find a lot of interesting discounts, but knowing which ones are worth your time and effort is another thing altogether.
That’s why the headlining feature of Google’s new shopping tools is the new ‘Deals’ destination in Search.
From now on, you can access the deals section very easily – you can just type “shop deals” in your Google search bar, and you’ll be taken to the deals section. There, you’ll not only see the best bargains that are available across thousands of partner sites, but the results will be tailored to your search history, making finding what you really like easy and much less time-consuming than browsing through hundreds of different sites.
The convenience of this function does not end here. You can also utilize filters to limit categories by simply navigating through a category carousel at the top of the page. Or, of course, you can just search for specific deals by typing something like “shop boots deals.”
Check for discounts in Chrome
Sometimes you don’t just want to shop for new deals, but also check on your previous finds – maybe they’ve gone down in price, or have a new discount coupon available? Now Google makes it not only incredibly easy, but places the discount on your favorite items right on your new tab page.
When you open a new tab in Chrome on a desktop, you can now expect to see much more than your website shortcuts. Right under them, you’ll see products that you’ve recently viewed on supported sites, together with any discounts and promotions that are active right now.
What’s more, you can also visit a site to do some shopping and click the new discount tab icon that appears in the address bar. Doing so will allow you to see any active discount codes available for that site, making it much easier to find even the most elusive of bargains.
See price trends in Chrome
Some discounts around Black Friday are significant, exclusive deals. However, some of them are unfortunately a little bit of a mixed bag, with retailers raising prices just before the holidays only to “discount” them to their regular price afterwards (or maybe even discount them to a higher price than before).
If you’re in the European Union, you don’t really have to worry about it, as sellers are required to present the lowest price of the item from the previous 30 days, but elsewhere it’s quite a common practice to dupe customers. That’s why pricing history checks are so popular, and now Google has one of its own.
The new price insights feature allows you to quickly see the graph of the price of an item over the months. It’s already available in Search, but the feature now makes its way to Chrome on the desktop. Shopping insights will show you not only the product’s typical price but also various retailers that stock that item, along with the ability to track the price and get notified if there is a significant discount.
Track the prices of your products
Speaking of tracking the price of the item, there are also some changes in that department that Google is introducing. When you’re checking out a product in Search on your mobile device, you can now find a bell icon next to its name. Clicking it allows you to set up email and push notifications that will alert you to any discounts from any retailer on the web that stocks that item.
There is also a new feature for all desktop users. You can now bookmark all your interested products in the new Shopping List folder. Doing so will also allow you to turn on notifications for these products, so you can keep them organized in your bookmarks and know all about the best discounts, all at the same time.
Where to get the best holiday gift ideas
As you can see, Google’s new tools and features help you not only find great products to buy but also help you hunt them down at the best possible prices. But before looking for anything specific, you should know what kind of presents you want to give to all your loved ones this holiday season.
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