4 Benefits of eCommerce wish lists

Wish lists are an almost ubiquitous tool in  e-Commerce platforms. This is because they provide a wide range of functionalities and benefits, both for the customer and for the merchant, across different moments of the purchase journey. From the customer’s perspective, they work as a personal catalog where users can save, organize, and prioritize the products that interest them without the pressure of making an immediate purchase. This allows them to compare options calmly, plan future purchases, and return to the store with clear intentions.

For merchants, wish lists are much more than a convenience feature. Properly implemented and analyzed, they become a strategic asset to increase engagement, improve conversion rates, and obtain valuable information about customer preferences and demand trends. Retailers can understand which products generate the most interest, which combinations of items are most frequent, and at what stages users interrupt the purchase process. With this insight, it is possible to design more effective promotions, optimize inventories, and tailor the shopping experience to different customer segments.

Below, you can learn in more detail about the main advantages of wish lists and key recommendations to configure, promote, and measure them effectively in your eCommerce, so that this capability contributes directly to sales growth, customer loyalty, and better business decisions.

1) Increase customer engagement or investment in the store:

When you offer customers the opportunity to save products they find attractive, interesting, or desirable in a list, you are incentivizing them to stay longer on the eCommerce site, to revisit the site on future occasions to follow up on their favorite products, and to create or strengthen their relationship with the merchant.

2) Increase sales:

If a customer wants to buy a product, but it is out of stock, you can add it to a wish list, so it is possible to notify them when their favorite products become available. Another consideration is when a customer does not want or cannot buy a product at a certain time, but wants to have it as a future purchase option, then he can add it to a wish list to resume his purchase at another time.

3) Attract new customers:

One of the most useful functionalities of wish lists is to allow sharing these lists with friends and family, this way. Upon receiving someone's wish list, it is common to click on the product links to read more information and possibly purchase it as a gift, which increases site navigation and the number of customers, but it is also possible that the person will find value in the product they are viewing or other products in the store and purchase them for themselves.

Ideally, the person who received the wish list from someone they know could create a wish list for themselves and share it with their acquaintances, which spreads the store quickly and generates organic growth.

4) Capture information to make business decisions:

Information has become perhaps the most valuable resource in recent times because it allows modeling and predicting the market and external factors that could affect trade. When customers add products to wish lists, they are essentially creating a profile of their tastes and preferences, and they must have an account with their personal information registered to make use of wish lists.

With this information, retailers can analyze their customers and create smarter business strategies. Some questions that could be solved with this information are:

• Which products have a low purchase rate but are on customers' wish lists? It may be worthwhile to make a promotion or price (or another attribute) adjustment for these other products since many people are interested in them but do not end up making a purchase.
  
  
• Which products tend to be grouped? Customers can create multiple wish lists, and it is often the case that each list has related products, for example, if a customer wants to buy a computer, he can add it to his wish list, along with a keyboard, mouse, speakers, chair and other components that complement or supplement his order.
  
  
  This information is useful to create bundles or combos of grouped products to improve the user experience for customers and obtain additional product sales.
  
  

We recommend you read: 3 Tips for Planning Your eCommerce b2b Strategy

Each eCommerce platform may vary in terms of configurations and options that allow wishing lists, that said, taking the Magento platform as an example, allows you to analyze the products added to the wish lists using the Advanced Reporting > Products section. Similarly, it is possible to create or install tools to capture and further analyze the information in the system.

Recommendations for use and configuration:

It is important to encourage customers to create wish lists, so the site must have visible and eye-catching buttons and text that tell users that they can create wish lists and add products to them.

Similarly, the creation of accounts on the site should be encouraged, since it is usually required to have an account to use the wish lists. You can encourage account creation by offering promotions or discount coupons for the first purchase with an account, by offering benefits such as loyalty plans or accumulated points, or as a last resort, by making it mandatory to create an account to proceed with the checkout.

If your eCommerce platform allows it, or you have a marketing automation tool, send automated emails and promotions (or as part of marketing campaigns) that use customer wish lists in your workflows. This way, for example, you can send a reminder to customers after a certain amount of time after they have added a product to their cart to buy it, possibly at a discount. 

Finally, it is recommended to make use of analytics tools such as Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics to visualize customer actions on your website, such as adding or removing products to a wish list. The most popular e-commerce platforms usually have integration tools to make these configurations quickly, so you can make strategic decisions intelligently and with as much information as possible.