During I/O, Google has announced open cart reminders for shopping built right into Chrome. It allows you to track your open carts on shopping websites inside the browser, without you having to leave the corresponding websites open indefinitely. But the company has also introduced a few other shopping features that are worth highlighting, including an option that allows you to connect your loyalty programs with your Google account to show you the best prices right away.
Resume shopping in Chrome
The cart feature lives on your new tab page, though thankfully, it’s hidden from view by default. You need to scroll down to see your carts. Depending on how many online shops you’ve visited in the past couple of weeks, you’ll see a side-scrolling carousel of website favicons and item previews. It looks like the feature is limited to the desktop version of the browser for now, though.
This should help reduce the number of tabs you need to leave open — I just hope Chrome won’t nag you about buying stuff you may have already decided not to buy.
Connect loyalty programs to your Google account
Google will take rebates and coupon codes that are part of select loyalty programs into account when comparing prices. Google says, “Coming soon, we’ll let you link your favorite loyalty programs from merchants like Sephora to your Google account to show you the best purchase options.” Once that’s done, you’ll see prices from merchants with rebates part of your loyalty programs pre-applied, right in Google Shopping. This should make it easier to see the best deal at a glance, without having to visit every individual shop. With some merchants forcing you to click all the way through the cart before applying coupons, that might be a boon for those who like to save a dollar or two.
Google has yet to share which merchants exactly it partnered up with — we can’t believe that Sephora will be the only one.
More prominent shopping in Google Lens
Google Lens is also getting a shopping treatment. When you search images using Lens in Google Photos, it will give you both organic research and shopping results for items like clothing, shoes, tech, and more, making it easy to find the exact product that might have given you inspiration.
Google also explained the shopping graph underlying all of this, the AI-enhanced tool that helps the company show you the best prices and comparisons. The company says, “The Shopping Graph is a dynamic, AI-enhanced model that understands a constantly-changing set of products, sellers, brands, reviews and most importantly, the product information and inventory data we receive from brands and retailers directly — as well as how those attributes relate to one another.”
We previously covered that Google Chrome for Android will let you track prices on websites you’ve got open, which is another piece in Google’s shopping puzzle.
