Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Amazon wishlists suck

With the holidays approaching, once again I struggle negotiating my amazon wishlist to figure out what books I really want for Christmas. There are so many things wrong with the usability of the wishlists that its hard to know where to start, but Marc has a good list going with some helpful feedback on what some others are doing to manage their wishlists.

This is definitely an area that is ripe for some startup to come in and just totally clean up. I’m sure amazon’s API has enough hooks where you could emulate the entire wishlist service from an external site (with plenty of ajax, of course), and hook into the associates program for revenue. I don’t know how much you could reasonably make from the associates thing - you would probably need massive volume to get anything decent. For a real nice service, though, I could see people paying a low yearly cost to get rid of the amazon model.

I have over 100 things on three different lists. I wouldn’t mind paying $20 a year for a really good wishlist service.

Five things Amazon should do to improve lists before Christmas 2006

• Ajax for sorting/modifying the lists
• Dispay “this item is in your wishlist” instead of “add to wishlist” to avoid duplicates
• Tags - multiple lists is a pain
• Better filtering - “show me everything on my list tagged “software” below $20″
• RSS feeds and clean URLs

Amen! I can’t understand why Wishlists are so hard to use, I would think that wishlists are a huge revenue feature for Amazon.com. I would like to be able to look at my entire list, yes all 300+ items, at one time. And be able to update multiple items without the whole page refreshing. This should be a snap with Ajax.

Joining the “Amazon Wishlists Suck” rabble-rousers

So it turns out that I’m not the only one who thinks that Amazon’s wishlist feature sucks. I kinda figured that was the case, but I had not - until tonight - made it a point to seek out other like-minded folks. It seems that there are a few.
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