The holiday shopping season is almost upon us, and it’s just about time for that new pre-shopping-season tradition: updating your Amazon wish list. Better get on it early, before your friends, relatives, or kindly-disposed strangers start doing their shopping!
Or, all right, your wish list on whatever shopping site you like to use. (But let’s face it, Amazon’s marketing machine is good enough that “Amazon” and “wish list” have pretty much become synonymous over the last few years.)
But this year, Amazon has something new cooking, that may entice you away from other sites’ wish lists: the “universal” wish list button. This is a great idea for everybody who has “wishes” from multiple e-tailer websites—especially those who buy e-books elsewhere (such as Webscriptions) but use Amazon’s wish list for their Amazon purchases.
I can’t remember exactly when Amazon announced this new innovation, though I get the feeling it was recently. It works through the use of a “bookmarklet” tool that you drag to your browser’s bookmark bar.
When you find an item that you would like to add to your Amazon wish list, just click the bookmarklet, then enter the price of the item and a description. When you are done, the item appears on your Amazon Wish List, with a button to redirect the wish list viewer to the origin site for shopping purposes.
This is a very clever innovation indeed. Given that Amazon is already the “go-to” site for wish lists, this provides a way that wishers can combine their wishes from all their favorite sites in one convenient place. Even if I strongly dislike some of Amazon’s business practices (with regard to the Kindle versus Mobipocket formats, for instance), I have to tip my hat to—and make use of—such a darned useful feature.
I have already added a couple of Baen Webscription months to my Amazon wish list, as well as a BluRay DVD drive from NewEgg. I can’t wait to see what I might wish for next!
It’s a great feature but it’s literally years old now. At least two as that’s when I started using amazon prime and started using universal wishlists too.
That said, amazon is working on improving their wishlist capabilities. The manager of their department that works on wishlists literally wrote me an email in response to a complaint I posed about not being able to wishlist eBooks. He said they are planning to support all their digital products in the near future.. Perhaps other useful features will be added too.
Maybe years old with Prime, but I use the wishlists around Christmas and my birthday and this is the first time I’ve seen the feature available to basic people.
Here’s a NY Times piece from July 2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/technology/30amazon.html?pagewanted=print
That’s interesting, Andrew, but not exactly the global wish list feature.
from the article:
“Amazon does seem to keep competing with the same retailers it is trying to help. Another new product that Amazon has introduced, Universal Wish List, is a Web browser toolbar that lets people directly add the products they covet to their Amazon account when they see them on other Web sites.”