Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using email to help track your online shopping

Online shopping can be a surprising amount of work: keeping up with payments, shipments, and bids.

In this week’s tip, countdiso shares a nice series of steps to keep up with all manner of shopping via emailed tasks.

I’m a bit of a bad lad for buying things from eBay (and Amazon, and pretty much everywhere else). However, during the day I am out at work, so not at home to get the delivery, so have it redirected to a local collection point.

Because I order a lot, I do often lose track of what I need to collect, so RTM to the rescue.

I started off by creating a new e-mail address just to use for online purchases, and then have that e-mail address just automatically forward all incoming mail to RTM.

On my phone, I already had a home screen widget to display my RTM Inbox tasks. So anything getting e-mailed in is displayed there.

When a new eBay item to collect pops up, I move it from Inbox to a shopping to collect list, which I also have a widget for. So that I now have a simple list showing me what outstanding items I have to collect.

A side bonus is that I also have is that if I’m outbid on an item on eBay, then it comes up as a task in my Inbox so I know to go and up my bid if I want to win. In completed tasks I also have a great log of communication from eBay allowing me to track all my purchases, or allowing the wife to track them :(

Thanks for sharing this tip, countdiso! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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