09 Jul 2003 | hurley #1 said...

Ive already purchased several of the items on my Wish Listwhy are they still listed?

I know you're saying you want to have the option of having purchased items automatically deleted from the wish list, but there's a good reason that's not done by default: wish lists are usually used for gifts, and Amazon doesn't want to spoil your surprise by deleting stuff that someone has bought for you.

But you can hide stuff that's been purchased. See this text that can be found from a link that appears on any Wish list page:

We've made some changes to the Wish List so that we don't spoil your surprises. When logged into your account, the default view of your own registry will show all the items on your Wish List, whether or not any item(s) have actually been purchased for you. You'll have to specifically select a different option from the drop-down menu at the top of your registry if you want to view your purchased (to see what people may have bought for you) or unpurchased items.

For friends and family viewing your Wish List, or if you are logged out of your account, the appearance of your Wish List will be unchanged--we will clearly show what has been purchased and what it is left unpurchased.

09 Jul 2003 | JF said...

wish lists are usually used for gifts, and Amazon doesn't want to spoil your surprise by deleting stuff that someone has bought for you.

I didn't think about that, but they should know WHO is purchasing them. If someone else, keep it on the list, if you, delete it.

09 Jul 2003 | suppafly said...

couldn't you do something like the amazon lite page http://www.kokogiak.com/amazon/ has done and use the amazon api to make your own wishlist view that looks how you want it to?

09 Jul 2003 | alan taylor said...

Yes, you could put together a wishlist manager with Amazon Webservices, but it's kinda difficult/buggy at the moment (trust me, I've tried on Amazon Light). When Amazon gets their Wishlist XML feed up-to-speed it'll be better. Right now, it's basically a list, without the unique ID that matches a customer to an item (so it's not removed from the wishlist if bought, and can't be shipped to the intended recipient, since without the ID, Amazon does not know who it's for). Also, the various properties like 'quantity desired', 'quantity purchased', and 'comments' are not returned either. Once those are added (I've been told they are coming), wishlist management and display tools like this seem like a great idea.

I already added a feature to Amazon Light called 'Your List', where you can gather items into a list for a while, then choose what to do with them - add them all to your cart, all to your wishlist, all to your wedding registry, printout a list of ASINs, etc. That part was easier.

10 Jul 2003 | nathan said...

The wish list should delete or flag purchased wish list items when the package has reached its final destination.

Amazon's pagination of shopping cart, save for later list, and wish lists is shockingly clunky. I think any interface with rows or grids of items that doesn't at least have a "show all" function is annoying. Why should users have to keep the previous 2 or 10 pages of shopping cart items in their head?

This "must always break longish pages into chunks" practice feels like Nielsen dogma.

10 Jul 2003 | Don Schenck said...

THREAD HI-JACK ALERT!!!

Hey gang, how and what is the best way for me to set up my own blog? Thanks.

(Oh ... free would be a definite bonus. I'm so tight with my money.)

10 Jul 2003 | Manda said...

My main wish list wish is that we could rearrange the order of the items. There are some items I added to my list years ago that I'd like to appear closer to the top, but there's no way to move them without deleting and re-adding each.

I also wish we could mark items 'purchased' ourselves. Sometimes something will go wrong and an item won't show as purchased. Or maybe I bought it at a different site instead but don't want to delete it totally from my list yet. Of course, that could be a reason why Amazon wouldn't want to add that feature.

I do wonder if perhaps we're asking too much of Amazon, though. After all, they keep recommending items to me that they know were bought off my wish list. I already have that, you idiot!

10 Jul 2003 | fajalar said...

On the topic of dogma, here's a slightly related article on paging vs. scrolling for reading online passages.

And here is a listing on usability.gov regarding it, but again it seems to be for informational sites.

Anyone have research on paging vs. scrolling for apps/ecommerce sites? Maybe it needs to be done.

Lastly, a Don and his blog. *shudder* ;P

10 Jul 2003 | Ben said...

I second the motion about being able to re-order the wish list items around. At the very least, since you can rate the items, if you could set it to sort by rating by default, you could then rate all your items by how much you want them (thus not going in a completely numerical fashion, but in grouped chunks.) I still think complete customization would be best, but I'm just thinking of other ways to do it.

I agree with all of ML's points, but I wonder if it's just something that can be handled by simply redesigning the page and its elements, without having to create a separate page that is so stripped down? The quantity and comments fields seem unnecessary (well, at least I don't use them after the first time I've added an item), or could at least be just shown on an "modify wish list" type of page.

I think most of people's problems with the Amazon wish lists stem from it serving 2 distinct purposes: one being a "possible purchases" list (by the person, for the person) but also still trying to be the "here are things you can buy me" list. In reality, I would love both... have a list of things I'm interested in, and be able to move them to my public wish list (maybe there are some things I'm not sure on yet... maybe there are things I want to buy, but don't want others to know I want it... etc)

10 Jul 2003 | Mariann said...

I'm able to delete more than one item on my wish list by simply changing the quantity desired from one to zero. Once I finish with the current page's display, I save my changes and continue. It's clunky, yes, but it does let me delete things en masse.

I'd love to download my wish list to PDA so I have it when I'm out and about. It'd be great if I could add items and then upload the wish list so Amazon's database would also accept the changes to keep the list current.

10 Jul 2003 | RS said...

maybe a public/private option for wish list items, ala MT's draft/publish option.

bam, two lists depending who's looking :)

10 Jul 2003 | Lance Osborne said...

I miss CDNow's "Favorite Artists" list, where you could easily jump to a page of a particular artist's releases. Unfortunately, the feature was removed once Amazon.com and CDNow merged. Would be nice to see this feature again (particularly since I had quite a few artists in my list and now can't remember who they all were).

10 Jul 2003 | hurley #1 said...

maybe a public/private option for wish list items, ala MT's draft/publish option.

bam, two lists depending who's looking :)

You can already do something like this using the pulldown menus on the Amazon wish list. You can filter the list to hide anything that's already been purchased, so you only see the stuff that hasn't been bought yet (by you or anyone else).

And by default there are already two lists depending on who's looking. Other people looking at your wish list automatically see what has and hasn't been purchased. When you look at your own list, you automaticaly see all items on your list, with no indication of whether they've been purchased or not. But it's really easy to hide the items that have aleady been purchased, you need only use the dropdown menu to filter the list.

10 Jul 2003 | Ben said...

The problem is that the only functionality they have are for whether you have (or someone else has) purchased an item or not. 95-99% of my life's purchases happen outside of Amazon, so the likelihood of that feature being used is slim. I mainly use the wishlist for my own archival purposes, which means I'm using it for not what it was intended for. I'm just suggesting I'm not the only one, and someone (Amazon) needs to realize that and create different functionalities to get the most out of my Amazon usage.

In theory, Amazon could become the clearinghouse for all my life's purchases (if they suited themselves to accept outside purchases better and easier), which would make me a very valuable commodity to them, as far as customer knowledge and product recommendations go.

10 Jul 2003 | Joe Grossberg said...

Mariann beat me to it.

I also use the "save changes" button, instead of "delete".

What the problem is though, is that it's not at all clear what "Save My Changes" does.

I believe it simply submits the form and saves the "desired" and "comments" for all items on the page. However, based on its location, one would think it does that for only one item.

Because HTML is stateless, I'm not sure there is a "right" solution and some sort of compromise is inevitable. Perhaps Amazon could have a "delete this item" checkbox next to each item, but that would only add more elements to a confusing page.

What would also be great in their Wishlist is the ability to sort by *used* price, not just list price.

10 Jul 2003 | Geof said...

"In theory, Amazon could become the clearinghouse for all my life's purchases (if they suited themselves to accept outside purchases better and easier), which would make me a very valuable commodity to them, as far as customer knowledge and product recommendations go."

It makes them have to think about themselves a bit differently: they'd be a data company and not so much an e-tailer. To do that, they'd probably want to charge you a fee to do upkeep and all that of your data.

But then, it's not a bad idea for them, long-term. For one, there's so much data-mining to be done. For another, they could be a Web front-end to so many more things than just their own stuff, which would make them money if they could charge a per-transaction fee to the seller.

10 Jul 2003 | chris said...

Use JF's Singlefile Singlefile to keep track of all of your books (not just the ones you bought though Amazon).

11 Jul 2003 | Fredclef said...

I was thinking about these same items about a month or so ago when I first started my wishlist. I agree completely and i think that 37signals should do a 37Better Project page commenting on these little nuisances. It would be cool to be able to mulitple lists for mailing to persons whom you want specific items. ^_^

13 Jul 2003 | adnan said...

also allow people to move items from shopping cart into the wishlist.

14 Jul 2003 | Ben said...

Amazon.com Wish List Ranking

On Amazon.com, you can only sort a wish list in one of three ways (by date added, by last updated, or by price). This site enables you to rank your wish list, so that the items you want most appear at the top of the list.

14 Jul 2003 | concrete said...

(Somewhat related to Ben's and Geof's comments.)

The most important wishlist feature, which Amazon erased a couple of years ago, is simply letting your friends mark something as 'bought', allowing them to have bought it from Amazon or another store.

Obviously, they're trying to lock your friends into buying from Amazon, but that sucks for wishlist usefulness, and that's why people should use an independent wishlist not tied to any one store.

Still would make sense for Amazon to bring back the feature, as the added usefulness would make more people (me at least) use it, and the ease of buying from Amazon will make them get most sales anyway. But, they've scared me away from their wishlist permanently.

So, I'm using wishlist.com. The interface is *bad*, and you have to bookmark a piece of javascript (or drag it to your toolbar), but it works. I can add items from other stores, stuff that Amazon will never have, or even vague descriptions to give the buyer a chance to use a little creativity.

Anyone know of other independent wishlists? (It's on my list of future projects for when I have free time.)

15 Jul 2003 | Dave said...

One work-around--the "open in new window" menu option (or magic-key-click in the Mac world).

If you want to delete multiple items, or add multiple items to your cart, go to the relevant button and do "open in new window". This will handle the item without having to re-render the original page, so you can delete or add-to-cart multiple items without having to re-render the main wish list page.

17 Jan 2004 | Hugh said...

At WWDC, I listened to Apple representatives make some excellent points about taking the time to build a 100%-compliant Aqua application, and I think all developers need to look beyond the code and listen to what the folks at Apple have to say

28 Nov 2004 | click said...

7925 Very well said chappy.