Order Wishlist Page: 9 Ways to boost conversions (and lessons from Amazon)

Humans procrastinate, right?

For most people, their eCommerce journey looks something like this:

BUT what if you can’t save something for later? 24% would likely just drop off.

That’s how important the order wishlist page is.

A vital part of eCommerce, the Order Wishlist page gives customers the chance to shop online on their own time how they see fit.

Google found that 40% of customers think a wishlist would improve their shopping experience.

Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for your eCommerce wishlist page.

9 Best Practices for the Order Wishlist Page (+ Amazon Case Study)

1. Ensure your wishlist has multiple features

If your wishlist is only good for saving products for later, you’re missing out.

Your eCommerce order wishlist page should be used as an opportunity to drive conversions and make the customer experience simpler.

Here are a few things you can do:

Activate sales alerts

(For eg: Your <wishlisted product> is now available at 20% off!)

Channel email plugs

(For eg: Email reminders to purchase products from the wishlist, or recommend similar products)

Enable upselling & cross-selling touchpoints

(For eg: bestselling products that complement the ones they have on their wishlist)

Run abandonment alerts

(For eg:  Don’t forget about <wishlisted product>. Come back in & make it yours)

Keep a track of audience-specific product trends and use these insights as plugs for cross-selling and upselling.

How Amazon nails this:

The Amazon Shopping List works just as a standard eCommerce order wishlist page would: customers can add items they’d like to save for later.

In addition, keep a track of price changes (and be notified when it occurs), get access to limited deals with the abandoned cart alert, and even stay updated with popular additions to those products.

2. Make your wishlist easy to share

People like talking about products they’re considering buying or have already bought.

There’s a reason why the Amazon share button is so obvious to spot.

Bring the same principle to your wishlist.

Give customers the space to share entire lists with their friends or family, give them room to take notes and exchange ideas right on the order wishlist page, and ensure that it’s incredibly easy to use.

Look into all sorts of privacy (Private, Shared, Public) and have an option to share access for View & Edit or View Only.

How Amazon nails this:

The Amazon wish list works as a registry where customers can save items they would like others to buy for them.

For a marketplace like Amazon, this is a GREAT deal.

Why? Because 42% of shoppers buy gifts on Amazon.

For this rather crucial part of the audience, it’s incredibly helpful for them to access their recipient’s interest and not have to rely on a mere guess.

Additionally, these make great (and branded!) additions to special occasions like baby showers, weddings, and graduation where a registry is a common practice. Great brand recall.

3. Be mindful of how the wishlist plays into the larger customer journey

The customer journey is often not linear. It’s more than just finding a product and making a purchase.

Often, eCommerce brands need to account for pre-purchase engagement and perception satisfaction.

The wishlist feature becomes a common part of this process and it’s important to be mindful of how it plays into the larger picture.

Use your buyer personas (for eg, a 25-year-old man) and build the different scenarios they may experience across their journey. Ensure that there are sufficient nudges & CTAs to nudge them in the right direction.

How Amazon nails this:

On Amazon, the customer journey begins like any other:

However, the next step is what makes it cool.

Here, you have the option to create multiple lists and fragment your products into these lists.

Once you have the list in place, you can play around.

With this, there are multiple possibilities the Amazon wishlist page creates. They’re just waiting to be explored.

Some of these are:

4. Make it easy for customers to filter through wishlisted products

Customers expect the search and filter functionality to be quick and easy, especially when they are shopping online.

So, why not make it easy for them to do this on your eCommerce wishlist page?

Give them the space to filter through the wishlist and find information that aligns with any concerns they may be facing.

Enable wishlists to be filterable across price, purchase status, priority, discount, and perhaps even review. The more functional, the better.

How Amazon nails this:

Amazon has certain features customers use when accessing wishlisted products:

• You can view products as a list or in grids
• You can filter between unpurchased, purchased, and all items
• You can set a priority and sort products by price or priority

Hey, check this out: 10 smart ideas to improve eCommerce filters (and 7 lessons from Amazon)

5. Make it easy for customers to add ideas to the wishlist

44% of customer search journeys start directly on Amazon.

So, it makes sense for Amazon to include ideas in their wishlists.

But it shouldn’t just be Amazon.

For most customers, the eCommerce shopping experience leaves them with similar alternatives to what they were looking for OR they bounce off thoughts after seeing some products.

Having a place to put down these ideas (and then build on them) is a great way to channel the entire creative process. Bring it to your website. Keep it native.

Give customers the space to store ideas, explore similar products, and even receive recommendations based on these ideas.

How Amazon nails this:

Amazon facilitates the use of a word or phrase as an idea. This idea can be stored as is, used to run a search across the platform, and be quantified or assigned a priority.

The button to access the top search results has good visibility, laying out the next steps for the customers.

Do read: eCommerce Website Optimization: 28 Improvements You Can Make Today

6. Make the next steps obvious

The eCommerce order wishlist page is an important piece of real estate for three reasons:

• It is often the last page customers view before checkout.
• It’s often a separate entity on the website, and not always easy to spot.
• It’s not always the first thing customers think of when starting a new journey.

So, it’s important for eCommerce brands to use the order wishlist page as a real-time asset with nudges that get customers to finish their journey.

Remember to outline the next steps for every customer:

• Make the Checkout button prominent (preferably in another color)
• Recommend similar products to the ones on their list (& offer deals to buy both together)
• Run re-engagement campaigns (nudge them to sign up for price-drop alerts)
• Highlight social media icons (get them to engage with your brand across channels)
• Include social proof and security certificates (to quieten down any last minute jitters)

The wishlist does not have to be the end. Include next-steps buttons like checkout or recommended products and run regular re-engagement campaigns for these users.

How Amazon nails this:

Amazon isn’t afraid to nudge customers in the direction they’d like them to go.

For example, just below the Ideas, there’s a button to access the top search results.

Wishlited products have a button just below them to access direct checkout.

You can also easily compare similar products, move products between lists, and filter through unpurchased items to get them all in one go.

7. Plug abandonment alerts for wishlists as well

Most eCommerce brands don’t re-engage abandoned-wishlist customers the same way they do with abandoned-cart users.

So, sometimes, it’s easy for customers to forget about these products.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can use your eCommerce order wishlist page as a channel to drive conversions directly to checkout.

Simply set up abandonment alerts for wishlists the way you would with an abandoned cart.

You could look into stuff like:

Better deals

(For eg: Your <wishlisted product> is now available at 10% off!)

Limited time offers

(For eg: Shop your wishlist within 10 minutes and get 30% off!)

Personalized nudges

(For eg: We see you browsing through <category>. Your <wishlisted product> would be a great fit)

Cross-selling nudges

(For eg: You’ve got great taste! Your <wishlisted product> would go well with <recommended product>)

Low-stock alerts

(For eg: Your <wishlisted product> only has 3 pieces left!)

Abandoned wishlists are just as valuable as abandoned carts. Set up abandonment alerts with personalized nudges, monetary incentives, and urgency triggers.

How Amazon nails this:

At this point, it’s important to remember that Amazon is a marketplace and not a direct seller.

So, when there’s abandonment, it’s more bothersome for the seller than Amazon directly.

Their approach? They educate sellers on how to recover abandoned wishlists.

Their advice includes:

• Offering lighting deals, Buy 1 Get 1 offers, discounted prices 
• Offering free shipping and faster delivery
• Simplifying returns and exchanges
• Sharing recommendations for wishlisted products

8. Bring in tools that’ll make your work easier

One of the easiest ways to scale wishlist recovery is with automation.

Using automated tools can help you monitor these patterns, trigger alerts for specific scenarios, and make sure your site remains a corporate asset.

You can use automation to:

Observe buying patterns

Pay attention to whether a particular buyer persona (or demographic) tends to wishlist products or abandon carts more often. If you notice a high volume of drop-offs, you could try running localized incentives.

Determine most commonly wishlisted products

You can identify products that have high traction but end up being wishlisted (and possible reasons for it) to see if there are any improvements you can make on your policies, pricing, etc.

Run Automated Pricing

Automated Pricing regulates the pricing of your product to give first priority to conversions. While it is great for getting more sales in, you may want to set a price floor on these products to ensure some level of profitability.

Send alerts triggered by specific events

Treat your wishlist recovery as a re-engagement campaign. Set up event-triggered tasks to bring customers back with push notifications, pop-ups, alerts, and email notifications.

Send push notifications (especially on special occasions)

Use sales-focused events (like Thanksgiving) to set up reminders for your customers to complete their purchase. You can also share insights on the popular wishlisted products that would be a good gift for gifting.

Scale wishlist recovery with automation. Observe buying patterns, regulate pricing, send low-stock warnings, send push-notifications and pop-ups.

How Amazon nails this:

Amazon has special features in place to help sellers recover abandoned wishlists.

Stuff like the Automate Pricing and Amazon Pinpoint.

As the name sounds, Automate Pricing is a tool that automatically regulates the pricing for products on Amazon to increase conversions.

The Amazon Pinpoint is especially cool. It is a native events API that solves abandonment scenarios with event-triggered journeys.

Take a look:

9. Make it easy to spot your wishlist

Like we’ve discussed earlier, one strong contributor for wishlist abandonment is low visibility.

If a customer can’t find your wishlist, they can’t really use it.

So, it’s important to ensure your wishlist is visible at all times. Use a placement that’s similar to other websites. Incorporate a contrasting color & highlight when a product is selected.

Look into making the wishlist button sticky. This can increase conversions by as much as 7.9%.

Amazon does NOT nail this:

You may agree when we say the Amazon wishlist page is great.

It is fragmented, filterable, accounts for different scenarios, and even has room for direct checkout.

However, there’s one thing that’s missing: it’s not easy to find.

Notice how you’ll easily skip through and just directly click on ‘Add to Cart’?

We get the functionality of it. Amazon wants to promote more purchases.

BUT there’s a whole world they’re missing out on by not adequately highlighting the ‘Add to Wish List’ feature.

Intentional? Probably. Effective? Maybe not.

Keep Reading: 11 Secrets behind Amazon’s high-converting product comparison charts

Quick FAQ for eCommerce Wishlist Page

1. What is eCommerce wishlist?

An eCommerce wishlist is a list of items that a customer wants to purchase, but has not yet purchased. This wishlist is generally a native feature of the website you’re accessing and stores any product you like on that website.

For an eCommerce brand, the eCommerce wishlist also offers insights into products customers are interested in but don’t immediately act upon — and possible improvements they can perform to facilitate that.

2. What is wishlist in Amazon?

There are two types of lists on Amazon: Shopping List and Wish List.

The Amazon Wish List works as a registry where customers can save products they like and then invite others to buy those items. It is a great addition to birthdays, weddings, and graduation registries.

The Amazon Shopping List is a strongly optimized eCommerce wishlist page that helps customers save products they like and access better pricing and limited-time offers.

3. How do I create a wishlist in eCommerce website?

While setting up a wishlist on your eCommerce website, there are a few best practices you should follow:

• Make it easy (& intuitive) to use
• Place it in a location that is obvious
• Highlight when a product has been wishlisted
• Give open access to the wishlist and help customers use it without registering
• Help customers edit the quantity, set a priority, and even receive alerts for price drops
• Optimize wishlist recovery and automate triggers for specific scenarios

4. What is the difference between wishlist and shopping cart?

Most eCommerce websites use two different methods of managing their customers' shopping. These two systems are wishlist and shopping cart.

Wishlists allow shoppers to record, track and manage their purchases without actually purchasing the item.

On the other hand, shopping carts keep track of all visitors' orders, but with the aim of making a purchase immediately.

5. Do wishlists increase sales?

By their very nature, wishlists are designed to help customers save product information and keep them for later use. They’re not designed to increase sales.

BUT when optimized as a channel to drive conversions, they’re a valuable asset that can help increase sales.

As we’ve seen with Amazon, a lot of their wishlist features are geared towards the purchase: checkout buttons, abandonment alerts, Automated Pricing, Amazon Pinpoint, and re-engagement campaigns.