Photo: In Green (Shutterstock)
Holiday shopping gets overwhelming fast, and keeping tabs on your many incoming purchases doesn’t help. You end up digging through your inbox constantly looking for shipping confirmations to check on ETAs and deliveries, and the more you buy, the worse it gets. But if you use Gmail, Google wants to help.
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In a blog post on Nov. 2, Google announced it would begin rolling out a new Gmail feature to help users keep track of their many shipping confirmations spread throughout their inbox. If the item in question has a tracking number, Gmail will show the delivery status directly in your inbox as if it were its own email. If you do open the original shipping confirmation email, though, you’ll see a delivery status card here as well, so no need to click through to the website of the delivery company to see where your package is.
You’ll see important updates in these cards as well, including “Label created,” “Arriving tomorrow,” or “Delivered today.”
How to set up delivery tracking in Gmail
When the feature hits your device, Gmail may present you with a card explaining the new feature, with an easy “Allow” button to use to set it up. If you don’t receive this card, or you accidentally dismissed it, you can enable the feature from your Gmail settings. You can see this card in the screenshot below, as well as the shipping confirmation that Gmail floats to the top of this demo inbox.
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This feature is still rolling out, so it might not hit your Gmail app just yet. Keep an eye out for this card, as well as your Gmail settings to set it up as soon as possible.
While it won’t be available in this initial rollout, Google has another useful package-tracking feature in the works. In “coming months,” packages that have been delayed will show up with a delay label at the top of your inbox. Hopefully, you won’t be surprised when you think something has been in transit this whole time, only to find it stuck somewhere.
