Amazon Wishlist

I’m going to be honest, the Wishlist on Amazon.com is probably THE biggest feature they have. And as it turns out this is the most difficult feature to find anywhere else to any sort of decency. I actually was surprised at how difficult it was to find an alternative, and even what I landed on, I’m not particularly happy with. What I wanted from a wishlist site was the ability to add from any source, preferably a search function so that I didn’t have to go to websites to add it, and an image of each item on the list. On top of that, I also wanted the ability for guests to mark it for removal without having the guest log in and without the owner getting notified. I wanted the site to do price comparisons of various online stores to list the best price available. And I wanted the ability to make categories and subcategories. This was a lot to ask for, and I only got a fraction of it. One of the predominant issues with almost every site was that you really couldn’t allow a guest to mark an item as purchased, and even if they allowed that, the guest would have to sign up to the random site which I also wasn’t fond of. There were also issues with sites not allowing multiple wishlists (this seemed ridiculous to me). And no site had the ability to price check various websites. Some sites also required you to manually upload pictures which just wasn’t cool either. The site I landed on to do my wishlists was Pinterest. I know, it took me a week or two of research to land on Pinterest?!?! Well yeah. Pinterest isn’t a great option either. But it is super easy to add stuff to lists, it’s easy to make subcategories on the list, it’s easy for random others to view the list, and you can also create private lists which only friends and family can view. It has no pricing capability what so ever and no ability for people to mark things as done, but these were things not many sites had anyway. And let’s be honest, the last one isn’t something Amazon has either. They don’t even price compare on their own site. They only tell you the price of the item you selected, so if that item is listed multiple times, the other versions will be completely ignored. I did have a moment where I decided to look up who exactly owns Pinterest. I thought at some point someone may have bought the company out, and thought that company was Facebook. But as it turns out Pinterest is privately owned, I think I was thinking of Instagram.  So know that if you buy into Pinterest, you aren’t giving your data to a different big company, they are their own thing.
If you decide to take up Pinterest as a wishlist software (which I don’t think I’m the only one who does this), I would strongly recommend downloading their browser extension that throws the pinterest logo on every image for easy adding. This makes it so that you can go to a store and peruse and be like “I want that” just as easily as you could peruse Amazon, except now your choices can be anywhere on the net, not just on the juggernaut.