Chrome for Android adds price tracking and more to help you finish your Christmas shopping

As you make the final touches on your Christmas shopping for your family and friends, you likely have loads of Chrome tabs up for items you’re mulling over but have yet to pull the trigger on. To help you along from consideration to purchasing, Google is adding several of Chrome for Desktop’s newest shopping features into Chrome for Android.

First, you can keep track of price drops on shopping items right from the Chrome tab overview mode. As you can see in the image below, any website with an item for purchase – whether it’s Amazon, the Google Store, or any other shopping site – will now display the current price drop of that item in a green chip-style card at the top-left of its tab. If you’re not seeing price tracking right now, sit tight – it’s said to be rolling out before the end of the week on Android, and in a few weeks on iOS.

Additionally, you can now use Google Lens from the search bar – the Omnibox – at the top of the mobile browser to enable your camera and point it at anything you find in the real world while you’re out shopping to find and buy it online with little effort. This takes “window shopping” to a whole new level. Instead of writing things down or just snapping a photo of them with your standard camera, you’ll instead be able to place them in your shopping cart without having to come back to it later.

Since Desktop Chrome added the shopping cart module on its new tab page to let you quickly return to whatever you’ve loaded into your Amazon cart or any other checkout section across the web, I’d wondered when we would see it on Android and iOS, and that time is now. By going to the new tab icon, the screen will present you with the same shopping carts you’d see on your computer so you can pick up where you left off!

Lastly, I want to mention that these last two items aren’t new, but Google recommended them on its blog post to help you simplify the Christmas shopping experience. Don’t forget that you can save your passwords, addresses, and payment information in Chrome so that you can checkout with ease and less typing. Do you see yourself using Chrome as a hub for all of your shopping needs?

I know that the company has been adamant about pivoting all of its experiences towards Google Shopping, and I’m still not sure how I feel about that. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve finished shopping for the holidays, or if you’re a straggler on the last few items like I am!