Wishlist in your webshop, yes or no?
Back in the days, having a Wishlist for which the customer could add products to- and for to later considering purchasing, was more or less a de-facto standard in all webshops around.
The idea of the Wishlist
The idea was that instead of the risk of losing the purchase all-together if the customer didn't wanna buy it like right now, it would be better to give them the opportunity to add it to a Wishlist instead, for later to (hopefully) buy it.
Our earlier recommendations on Wishlist
After building hundreds of webshops over the last 15 years we have seen over and over that the usage of the Wishlist functionality has been very low, and our clear recommendation to more or less all our clients has been to simply drop the Wishlist all-together, and focus 100% on the Add to Cart CTA button.
For clients who absolutely wanted a Wishlist for various (normally guess-work based) reasons, we convinced most to at least make it possible to add products to the Wishlist without the need to sign up and log in, yet still we recommended pretty much all our clients to simply drop it.
Our today's recommendations on Wishlist
Fast-forwarding to today (2019 as of writing this article) the interesting thing is that our recommendation is exactly the same, even stronger, both based upon even more extensive experience on the usage (or, lack of usage of the feature) of the Wishlist functionality and also that during the last years there has been done much research on the area, which all proves the Wishlist functionality for most stores is simply not something you'd want.
Why shall we not have a Wishlist? The customer clearly wants to be reminded of products they wanna buy later
- Wishlist works so differently for the various stores, making it unclear for the customer what to expect. Some require login, some don't. And yet some require you to just give your email. All these variants of one single feature makes the customer very uncertain, and online shoppers don't have that kind of patience.
- Takes away the focus. The “Add to Wishlist” takes the focus away from the “Add to Cart”. In-depth UX-research clearly proves that pretty much every single extra element or link added to the page reduces the conversion rate significantly, specially elements directly competing with the “Add to Cart”-button.
- The various stores name Wishlist different things. Although most call it Wishlist, some call it Favorites, and some My Products.
But most importantly …
Customers are today using the Shopping Cart as “Wishlist”. Lots of studies (and you can most likely just look at your own shopping behavior) shows that customers simply add all products they assume to buy into the shopping cart.
Simple as that.
Shall no'one have Wishlist then?
Sure. Specially B2B stores should definitely have some place to temporarily store even multiple “wishlists”, however then they shall be named “Requisition lists”.
Also, huge webshops like Amazon and Zalando benefit highly on their Wishlists, however most of the world'd webshops must not compare themselves with these gigants, which both has millions and millions of registered customers.
As a rule of thumb, if most of your clients are coming back time after time, making up to dozens of orders every year, then you should have a Wishlist functionality in, as most of such returning clients would create a customer account anyway, to be able to skip the hazzle of filling out all the customer details over and over again.
Ok, that was easy. So for most stores, like ours — no extra features then?
Well, yes.
As customers now have “replaced” the wishlist functionality with the shopping cart, there are three features that should be considered to be added to the shopping cart:
- “Save for Later”. As the customer wants to make a purchase of the products existing in the shopping cart, they might want to put aside one or two items for later, and then a “Save for Later” function is perfect.
- Abandon cart reminder. This is also important. Try to fetch the email address of the customer gracefully, clearly stating that you will remind the customer about the cart for later.
- Persistent shopping cart. Make sure the cookie lifetime (TTL, Time To Live) for the shopping cart is 30 days or more.
Good stuff. Any further research-based stuff we can read ourselves up on?
You can start with one of the most reliable sources, from Nielsen Norman Group, doing in-depth research of pretty much all types of online behavior.
