Google is adding a new ‘shopping list’ feature to Chrome. It will be a part of Chrome bookmarks.

Shopping List (Code Name – Wall-e)

Google has been busy re-designing and re-imagining Chrome’s bookmarks. We recently saw the addition of a reading list and a side panel hosting bookmarks and your reading list. Now, they are bringing you a shopping list to the picture.

Google Chrome on Android has been adding shopping features like price tracking and shopping cart. The new shopping list feature could be an extension of these efforts.

Here is the flag that I spotted in the Chromium Gerrit repository today:

Shopping List: Enable shopping list in bookmarks

The flag name and description do not give many details. However, we have the feature request bug to help. It is not much, but still, here you go:

This bug tracks the work associated with building the shopping surface for wall-e. The initial implementation will be a separate UI that is shown in place of the current bookmark UI.

What’s the Plan?

We already have a Google-powered shopping list at https://shoppinglist.google.com/. Will this new feature connect to this existing shopping list? That’s something I am curious about. Or, is the plan to automatically generate a ‘wish list’ based on your browsing history?

Here is another related code change request which gives me this suspicion:

This patch add the infra that will be used to process and provide information to bookmarks about shopping related information on the page. The provider is implemented as WebContentsUserData that watches for committed navigations. When a navigation is detected, the provider checks optimization guide to determine if the page is shopping related, and if it is, run a script to extract meta tags.

If you look at code comments from that commit you will see things like “If the page was determined to be shopping-related, run the on-page extractor.”

It reminds me of a Chrome extension that I have used in the past. It looks for media files on pages you visit. You can later visit the extension’s page to see a playlist created from all these media files.

Is Google trying to aggregate your shopping activities? Will they list all the items you looked at, or added to the cart and track price changes, across multiple eCommerce websites?

Sounds interesting? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.