Chrome for Android now lets you hit the bell icon on product pages with price tracking rollout

Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai himself has proclaimed Google Shopping one of the single most important services the companies offer as it ties into not only the web and mobile efforts to monetize beyond ad revenue, but also the largest screen in your family’s home – the living room.

Over the course of the past few years, Shopping has become integrated into everything from Chrome to Google Collections and even into YouTube with a dedicated tab for products while you watch a sponsored video. Like it or not, Product integration across the ecosystem is here to stay, and is likely going to increase in the foreseeable future.

Last year, Google added price tracking tags to Chrome for Android tabs in the overview mode so that you could see when something is discounted and jump at the opportunity. It then followed up by adding price tracking chips into Chrome for desktop’s “Power Bookmarks” side panel refresh.

Today, I was browsing for a folio cover for my new Boox Note Air 2 Plus (which I’ll have some cool Google app write-ups for in the near future) and I noticed a new bell icon with a plus symbol next to it at the top of the mobile browser just next to the address bar. Tapping it revealed a popup at the bottom of the screen stating that the web page was added to my mobile bookmarks.

However, this isn’t a replacement for the traditional star icon used to bookmark things since the Netscape days, though it technically does exactly that. Instead, it’s meant to add it to the new “Tracked products” section of the bookmarks area. To be clear, this special, new bookmark folder is not tied to Google Collections or Google Shopping (yet), but I know that once the feature is fully implemented, any web page where something you can buy can be found will be added here instead of a standard bookmark section.

Once that’s all set up to work properly, tapping “Tracked products” should list anything you’ve saved to “buy later” so you can, well, buy them later. The whole point is to separate these types of web pages from standard non-product-related pages, read later articles, and more. Ultimately, It will be a welcome feature for many, and today, I encountered a need for it, so I’m excited to see it become official.