Gmail adds smarter tools for tracking purchases and finding deals

With the holiday shopping season approaching, Google is giving Gmail a timely update designed to make life easier for anyone who shops online. The popular email service is introducing new features that promise to simplify package tracking and highlight deals in a more intuitive way. The changes, rolling out globally across Android, iOS, and the web, aim to turn Gmail into more than just a mailbox—it’s becoming a shopping assistant too.

At the heart of the update is a new Purchases view, which gathers all of a user’s order confirmations, shipping updates, and delivery notifications into a single, organized list. Google describes it as a bird’s-eye view of your upcoming package deliveries, a tool that allows you to see at a glance what’s on its way and when it will arrive. Instead of scrolling through dozens of emails to find tracking numbers or order receipts, users will now have a centralized space dedicated to their purchases.

This isn’t the first time Gmail has experimented with integrating shopping tools directly into the inbox. The service already offers summary cards within purchase-related emails, showing an at-a-glance update on shipping progress. These cards often include a button that lets users activate optional order tracking. Once enabled, Gmail begins pulling real-time updates from shipping carriers, so the information displayed is always current. The new Purchases view expands on this idea by collecting all such emails into a streamlined interface that lives in the left-hand navigation menu, accessible with just one click.

Meanwhile, Gmail’s ability to highlight time-sensitive deliveries will remain in place. Any package due to arrive within the next 24 hours will continue to appear at the top of the primary inbox, ensuring that important alerts don’t get buried beneath promotional emails or newsletters. This continuity reflects Google’s broader effort to make Gmail a hub where essential information rises to the surface without requiring users to hunt for it.

Alongside purchase tracking, Google is also upgrading how Gmail handles promotional emails. For years, the Promotions tab has acted as a filter, collecting marketing messages, discounts, and newsletters. But the latest update makes it more intelligent by offering two new ways to organize these emails: most relevant and most recent. Choosing the most relevant option will push to the top those deals and offers from brands or senders with whom the user frequently interacts. In practice, this means that sales from your favorite clothing retailer or special discounts from an airline you’ve booked with before will appear more prominently than random messages from unfamiliar senders. On the other hand, the most recent filter will maintain the traditional chronological order.

Adding to this, Google is introducing dynamic cards within the Promotions tab. These cards will appear at the top of the screen with nudges such as “top deals for you,” aiming to surface the promotions most likely to interest each user. This personalized touch aligns with Google’s broader strategy of blending AI and data-driven recommendations into its consumer services, making inboxes feel more curated and useful rather than cluttered and overwhelming.

The update comes at a strategic moment. With online shopping continuing to surge, particularly during the run-up to the holiday season, the ability to manage purchases and track deliveries within Gmail could prove a major convenience for millions of users. Instead of copying tracking numbers into courier websites or digging through email chains, customers will have a simplified process directly within the app they already use daily.

For businesses and marketers, the changes to the Promotions tab are equally significant. Brands that consistently engage their audiences may now see their campaigns featured more prominently, giving them an incentive to focus on personalized communication and building stronger relationships with customers. At the same time, users benefit by seeing fewer irrelevant ads and more of the deals they actually care about.

The rollout is already underway, with Gmail users around the world beginning to see the new Purchases view in their apps and web browsers. The Promotions tab updates will arrive in the coming weeks, with Google promising availability for all account holders regardless of platform.