4 apps to make your holiday shopping more joyful

Thanksgiving is over, which means the holiday shopping season is officially around – with it the excitement and stress of finding all the items on the list.

If you like planning ahead, you may have snapped up some stuff at the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday promotions, but now you have a bunch of orders to track. If you prefer adventure and save holiday shopping until mid-December, you need inspiration, tracking robots and some traditional listings. You can get all three of these things on your phone – just install these apps and turn it into a pocket version of Santa’s little assistant.

Santa's Bag

Sit down and make a budget before you start adding items to your cart. Prices in the United States are still rising, which means you may spend more than you expected. Santa's bag can help you solve this problem.

This Apple device-only app allows you to set a total budget for your holiday gifts and manually track what you have purchased, packaged, or ordered, and which items are still waiting. You can add as many items as you like to each person and track all gift ideas, even if they are homemade.

[Related: Best Secret Santa Platform Ranking]

On the home screen, you'll see your current spending compared to the limit you set at the start of the holiday season and whether you're overspending or not overspending. The same screen will also show how many days are left before Christmas, which may be your deadline. But if you don't celebrate Christmas, this feature may make no sense to you because it's the only festival available and you can't change it. However, you can change the skin tone of Santa Claus – just click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen, go to the settings of the and find the skin tone of Santa Claus. Santa's bags are optimized to work with Amazon and other retailers such as Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart, so you can browse items from these stores directly on the app and add them Go to your list.

Santa's Bag

Suitable for iOS and iPadOS, free to use. Yahoo Email

Yes, this is an email app, but listen to me – the Yahoo Mailbox app is designed specifically to track online purchases, transactions, and many other content related to shopping. If this doesn't sound like a useful holiday tool, we don't know what else to count.

The platform is an email manager or client, which means you don't need to have a Yahoo email address to use it - you can sync your Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud account and it works fine. Conveniently, once you download and set up the app, you will see two tabs at the bottom of the screen and they will become your best shopping partner.

Click on the Shopping tag to view all marketing emails you receive in chronological order. You can also organize it by brand and categories such as food, clothing, beauty and travel. You can also sort the email further by selecting one of the tags at the top of the screen. Click Trade and you will be able to see all the promotions, discounts and coupons in your inbox. If you have a savings code for gifts, you will find it here. The last tag is Gift Card, and you can check if there is an unused credit limit for any particular store.

Back to the bottom of the screen, click Receipt to view all purchase confirmations in your inbox. The app will show a short preview of each receipt, not the entire email, so you will only see important information: what you purchased and what it costs. This feature makes it easier to distinguish different receipts from the same store, and it will come in handy if you need to make any returns after holidays. As an additional bonus, this tag will also tell you that the free trial is about to expire and how many days you have to use. Three days before the deadline, you'll see a prominent notification appearing above your inbox, reappearing every day so you won't miss it.

When your gift is in transit, click the Parcel tag at the top of the screen to view all tracking numbers in the order. You can click on a number to open the confirmation email for your order, or click on the Copy icon (looks like two sheets of paper) to copy the tracking number to the device's clipboard. Here you can also enable the automatic tracking feature, which will track the shipping information of the package and notify you when there are any updates to your order location. Yahoo outsources this service to third parties, but the company says via email that they only share your tracking number, so information like your name, address and credit card details are safe.

Yahoo Email Suitable for Android and iOS, free to use.

Google search

You can believe that the world's largest online search engine is interested in making your holiday shopping easier.

The most unique part of Google Shopping’s feature is augmented reality, which was launched earlier this year. Currently, this feature mainly helps you purchase furniture, allowing you to virtually introduce 3D renderings of chairs and tables into your space so that you know what they look like before ordering. If you plan to give your living room a new, more comfortable sofa, search Google and open the Shopping tab. You will see all the items that match your search and the AR-compatible items at each angle (their image has a 3D icon in the upper left corner). If you want to see what an item looks like in your home, click on the image and select to view in my space to let the magic happen. The same feature works for shoes, but because it's relatively new, you may not see it on many items yet, the company says. Google also plans to expand it to other clothing items.

But, holidays are not just about shopping—it's about diet. If you are the host this year, you may be afraid to lock yourself in the kitchen for hours before the guests arrive. Google can help you cheat by tracking specific dishes you can order at nearby restaurants.

Sophia Lin, general manager of Google Search’s food department, said the company’s research shows that 40% of people already know what they are looking for when searching for takeout. If you've had this situation, you'll know what's going to happen next: Flip through countless menus in countless places and pray that they have something you crave. Now, if you have any ideas for a hearty holiday dinner or even a quick craving, you can search for the name of the dish as well as the word “near me” and choose the restaurant you want to order from. This feature is especially useful if your guests ask for specific dishes you won't make or don't want to make (such as their mom's very special garlic roasted yam recipe).

Google search Applicable to Android, iOS and the Internet, free to use.

Inventory Robot

If you have a hard-to-find item on your shopping list this year, you may be already scared of looking for it. You'd better let the robot do the heavy lifting for you.

Stock Robot is an app that can track hard to find items and the entire product category for you. You don't need to keep the app open to make it work, and the app will notify you when items, whether they are very popular or more specific items, are re-listed so you can quickly snap up and take them home.

[Related: 5 Tips for Tracking Out-of-stock Products This Holiday Season]

To get real-time push notifications on your phone, you will need to pay a subscription starting at $4.99 per month, but you can get a free three-day trial first. If you think this will seriously affect your holiday budget, you can still track items for free and get notifications via the app's dedicated Twitter account (e.g. @BotConsoles for games, @InvbotFunko for Funko Pop). But remember that these posts have a 45-90-second delay, so if you're looking for a prized item that may be removed immediately after it becomes available, you may need to pay to subscribe.

The difference between the inventory robot and other product tracking platforms is that it has an automated checkout feature. This means that once your item is back on the market, you can authorize the app to purchase items for you. This is only possible with some retailers working with the platform (such as Amazon and Walmart, etc.), but the development team said more retailers will join in the future.

Stock robot Suitable for Android and iOS, free to use. Subscriptions for features such as direct notifications start from $4.99 per month. *

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