Feature Idea: Wishlist

I’m not sure if this has been brought up before, but I’ve been mulling over a new feature idea in my head for a while now.

Problem: With literally tens of thousands (or more) of products on each marketplace, it can be really tricky to keep track of the items that you want to purchase in the future. I’ve personally resorted to creating a private bookmark set called “Things I Want to Buy”, but this feels hacky and lacks the benefits of a dedicated feature.

Proposed Solution (ideas are welcome): Much like Audible.com ’s and Amazon.com ’s wishlist system, users would be able to add individual products to a wishlist via a simple, obvious button in the product sidebar. This would functionally act much like a bookmark set, but the contents of the “wishlist” could be surfaced in various locations of the user’s account pages; IE: the first thing they see after the make a deposit, as an extra custom row (or tab) of thumbnails on the user’s version of the homepage, etc. It could even be a new button next to “Show Popular Items”. Finally, the Wishlist could be emailed to users seasonally along with other site news, prompting users who haven’t been to the site in a while to return.

Additionally, kind and generous authors could “gift” the product to specific buyers in rare scenarios by deducting their commission from their account.

Who is this for? What’s the Purpose?: As I’ve mentioned – this feature is somewhat redundant with the current bookmarking system as well as the follow-author feature; For many of us that are familiar with the way that the Envato works, it’ll be a neat feature, but nothing revolutionary. This feature is specifically targeted at the broad demographic of buyers who aren’t familiar with marketplace and who may be overwhelmed by the vast array of products out there. This feature helps them to quickly tag items that they’ve seen and want to purchase, but aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet. It also introduces them to the concept of bookmark sets, which in effect educates them and helps them feel more comfortable on the site. Comfortable, well educated users will probably buy more products

Thoughts? Criticism? Additional Ideas? Is this feature bloat? All comments are welcome.

Nice idea – If we would be able to know how many time our item are added in the wishlist (or bookmarked) , it would also be really cool.

Yep – I debated integrating some “Add as Favorite” ideas into this feature proposal, but it’s tough to say whether they would make sense being grouped. In most cases, “favorites” is a good idea, but a worthless metric here at the marketplace because it doesn’t say anything about sales – just about the popularity of a given item (which the # of sales should do anyways).

Agreed though – it’d be great for authors to see how many times their own products had been wishlisted next to how many have purchases have been made.

when you started to talk about reminding buyer of wish list items after deposit process or sending it to the e-mail – i starrted to like the idea. otherwise there is no much use of this feature because we can all see coments at our items that says something like this: “I want to buy as soon as possible”, “I will buy this”, “this will be my next purchase” etc. the funny thing is – so far I’ve seen almost none “purchased” badge next to such comment. And here comes the old saying – talk less – do more. those who want to buy – they just buy. those who are talking like that – they almost never buy.

when you started to talk about reminding buyer of wish list items after deposit process or sending it to the e-mail – i starrted to like the idea. otherwise there is no much use of this feature because we can all see coments at our items that says something like this: “I want to buy as soon as possible”, “I will buy this”, “this will be my next purchase” etc. the funny thing is – so far I’ve seen almost none “purchased” badge next to such comment. And here comes the old saying – talk less – do more. those who want to buy – they just buy. those who are talking like that – they almost never buy.

Great thoughts – and yes – this feature would need to have unique functionality tied to it, otherwise it’s pretty much useless (or it becomes nothing other than a fancy bookmark set – in which case, why bother?). The idea here is to re-surface content that’s buyers have labeled that they are interested in buying.

I’m sure you are totally correct that most people who don’t make a purchase the first time won’t ever make a purchase, but even a 5% improvement on the conversion process would net boatloads of money for authors overall. Small incremental changes like this can have dramatic effects on the overall user experience, as well as the total amount of sales.

I’ll offer a quick rebuttal though: while I might not return to buy everything in my Amazon.com wishlist, I do have a much higher probability of returning to buy those products in the future than if they were simply re-buried along with the hoards of other products.

This proposed feature would obviously need more thought on the part of the devs/admins to really get it right, but discussions like this are where new features can find life, so keep the comments coming