Blog HomeNot every buyer is ready to make a purchase right away. That’s why tools like “Save for Later” are so important when it comes to online shopping: they eliminate the need to rely on memory or chance and allow shoppers to save an item they want to revisit later.
Even better? They give brands an opportunity to follow up with a nudge, a reminder, or a “hey, it’s almost sold out” heads-up.
That’s not just good UX—it’s good business. As customer acquisition costs rise and cookie-based retargeting fades out, Save for Later tools provide access to invaluable buyer intent data. Let’s look at a few proven, data-backed ways Save for Later tools drive sales.
A Save for Later tool (sometimes called a wishlist) is an ecommerce feature that lets shoppers earmark items they’re interested in without having to purchase them right away. This feature appears when someone deletes an item from a cart, asking them if they’d like to earmark it to revisit later on. Having this functionality in place lets online shoppers compare items or checkout with a cart full of items they love.
Save for Later items also present brands with an excellent opportunity to trigger highly personalized emails or push notifications (like price drop alerts or low-stock warnings), nudging shoppers to return and complete their purchases.
With Shopify’s latest benchmark showing that the average ecommerce store converts at just 1.4%, and only the top performers reach beyond 4.7%, it’s clear that online cart abandonment is a real issue. However, a Save for Later tool gives those shoppers a way to hold onto products they’re interested in—and gives brands a second chance to bring them back with reminders, offers, or low-stock alerts.
Take Lane 201, for example—a growing apparel brand that uses Swym’s Save for Later tool to help shoppers keep track of items they’re interested in.
They connected it to their Klaviyo email flows, so whenever someone saves a product, they follow up automatically with a quick price-drop alert, a low-stock warning, or a friendly nudge to “add all to cart.” And it works: 45% of their online revenue now comes from shoppers who used Save for Later, and those orders have a 90% higher average order value than their typical purchases.
With some basic context in place on how a Save for Later tool works, let’s next look at a few proven, data-backed ways brands are using Save for Later tool to boost revenue.
Most shoppers don’t buy on their first visit. They browse, hesitate, compare prices, or just get distracted. If you don’t give them an easy way to save what caught their eye on your site, they’ll simply move on to another site, and the interest might disappear. Once they’re gone, you either lose track of those potential customers, or if you plan to bring them back, it means spending again on retargeting or paid ads.
A Save for Later tool gives these high-intent visitors a low-pressure way to indicate, “I like this—I’ll come back to it soon when I’m ready to buy.” In fact, stats suggest that 30 % of shoppers use save‑for‑later to park an item while they decide or evaluate their options. Without this feature, this important customer intent slips through the cracks.
A friction‑free save-for-later button traps that intent so you can nudge them later through email, SMS, or push notifications instead of paying to reacquire or acquire a new customer altogether.
Wild Oak Boutique, a US-based fashion brand, added Swym’s Wishlist Plus—a platform that helps brands incorporate Save for Later feature to their site—to their Shopify store with this exact goal. They wanted a Save for Later tool that could grow with their business and integrate with their tech stack.
Using Swym’s native integrations with Klaviyo, Yotpo, and Tapcart, they connected wishlist and save-for-later actions directly to their email, SMS, and push campaigns. Now, when a customer saves an item (whether on mobile or desktop), they receive follow-ups like:
Since adding Swym Wishlist Plus, Wild Oak Boutique has doubled its conversion rate and seen a 23% increase in AOV. Wishlist-driven revenue is up 85% year over year, and their SMS campaigns tied to saved items deliver a 170× ROI, making Save for Later one of their most effective revenue channels.
Pro tip: Make your Save for Later button easy to spot on product and cart pages. Label it clearly (e.g., “Save to List” or “Keep for Later”) and avoid burying it behind icons. The easier it is to use, the more signals you’ll collect, giving you more follow-up opportunities.
According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70% across ecommerce. That means that for every 10 items that are added to a cart, only three are purchased. The rest? They vanish—often because of high shipping costs, needing more time to think, or getting overwhelmed mid-checkout.
That’s where Save for Later offers a smarter alternative. Instead of forcing a “buy now or disappear” moment, it lets shoppers remove an item from their cart without losing it entirely.
That saved product still lives in their account, giving you an organic opportunity to send out targeted reminders (“Still want this?”) to win back customers sitting on the fence—these are the type of customers you’d normally lose if not for the save for later feature.
SWYM’s save for later reminders (Source)
For example, GAÂLA, the slow‑fashion label, did precisely this with Swym’s Save for Later + Klaviyo reminders. They sent out personalized reminders and promotions built around the customer’s specific interests, and the flow helped them recover thousands of dollars from cart‑removed items.
It now drives 11 % of total revenue and 13 % of orders, and earns 50 % more revenue per recipient than their standard abandoned-cart emails.
Pro tip: Instead of just sending a generic “You left something behind” email, use Save for Later flows to show exactly what the shopper saved, along with urgency cues like “Selling fast” or “Only 2 left in stock.”
Don’t forget to tailor your subject line and preview text either, to reflect the exact item they saved—for instance, something like: “[First name], the linen dress you loved is still here.” After all, personalized subject lines can boost open rates by 26%, according to Campaign Monitor.
With third-party cookies fading out and privacy rules tightening, ecommerce brands need new ways to track shopper intent—without guessing or crossing any privacy lines.
One of the most valuable sources of this data? Your Save for Later and wishlist activity. Every time a shopper taps “Save for Later,” you can capture a first‑party intent signal: exact SKU, variant (size, color), and the moment they flagged interest. Unlike third‑party cookies, this data is available in your store’s own database and is fully privacy‑compliant and future‑proof.
This lets you know your customers better and trigger ultra-targeted flows based on what shoppers actually want, not just what pages they happened to click on. Think price drops, precise product recommendations, or offering similar items if something similar is out of stock.
This means that instead of sending vague “We miss you” emails, you can send:
Pro tip: You can also use Save for Later activity to build email segments like “Saved but didn’t purchase in 7 days” or “Saved multiple products from the same category.” These segments let you follow up with highly relevant messages, like low-stock alerts, price-drop notifications, or curated product bundles. And since the signals come directly from shoppers’ behavior, your emails will feel timely and personal.
U.S. retailers bleed $300 billion yearly in markdown losses, primarily from stocking the wrong items. That kind of waste isn’t always due to poor product quality—it’s often a data problem. Brands plan inventory based on what sells, not what shoppers wanted but didn’t buy.
Save for Later gives you an edge here. Every time a shopper saves an item—even if they don’t convert right away—it tells you precisely what shoppers want and are in demand. This kind of intent data can help you make sharper decisions about what to restock, which item variant to expand, and what to promote more.
For example, if you notice products with lots of saves but few purchases, that could mean there’s interest, but something’s blocking the conversion. Maybe the item is out of stock, missing a key size, or buried too deep in your catalog.
To spot this hidden demand, check your Save for Later and wishlist reports regularly. If you’re using a tool like Swym, you can do this through the Wishlist Plus reporting dashboard. You’ll be able to:
Swym’s save for later feature analysis (Source)
If you review this data regularly (say, monthly), you’ll be able to make better decisions about what to restock, feature on your homepage, or promote in campaigns. And the best part? It’s based on data that customers are actually giving you, stating what they want.
In 2025, success means knowing what your customers want, when they want it, and how to bring them back when they’re ready. A well-implemented Save for Later tool perfectly bridges that gap. It gives shoppers flexibility while giving you high-intent signals you can act on—whether that’s through smarter emails, better inventory decisions, or timely reminders.
If you’re looking to tap into this behavior and build smarter follow-up flows, Swym’s Wishlist Plus makes it easy. Plus, Swym integrates with Shopify and tools like Klaviyo, Yotpo, and Tapcart—so you can start capturing Save for Later activity and trigger personalized emails, SMS, or push notifications the moment someone saves a product.
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