Use Outlook to track delivery of online orders from Ebay, Amazon or other retailers.
Outlook can be easily used to track online orders from Ebay, Amazon to make sure they arrive.
When you’re ordering a lot of items online it’s easy to overlook one. Outlook can pop-up a reminder for each package so you don’t forget something.
It all starts with the order confirmation email or the email telling you the parcel is on its way. Right-click that message and choose Follow Up | Add Reminder.
You could just choose ‘Tomorrow’ or ‘Next Week’ but the Custom reminder is more configurable.
Change the ‘Flag to’ text from one of the plain bits of text from Microsoft to something more specific.
Fast Date Set
You can enter a start date or choose from the calendar but it’s often faster just to type in the number of days ahead. Outlook is pretty smart about it – all these will work “ten days” “10 days” “week” “ 2 weeks” “month” “three months”. It isn’t fussy about singular/plural; “7 day” is accepted as well as “7 days”.
We usually set a reminder for a day or two after the package is supposed to arrive. If the parcel is due in a week we might type ’10 days’.
As long as you type an acceptable time period, Outlook will change the Start, Due and Reminder dates when you click outside the ‘Start date’ field or press tab to exit that field.
At the reminder time a pop-up will appear in Outlook (and any device you have sync’d with it).
Usually the parcel has arrived and clicking ‘Dismiss’ is enough. But occasionally something has gone wrong and the reminder prompts us to track the parcel or enquire to the merchant.
When there are a lot of items arriving the reminder might need to be more specific. If you look at the reminder above, the subject line of the email tells us nothing about the ordered item nor does ‘Has this arrived’. So putting the name of the item in the ‘Flag to’ line saves you digging around to find out what the reminder was for!
If you want to find out what parcels are due soon, simply search for any flagged items:
