Blog HomeLearn how saved carts fall short for ecommerce and how a wishlist strategy helps capture intent, drive revenue, and turn maybes into meaningful action.
Imagine this: a shopper spends about 20 minutes adding products to their cart…only to close the tab and never return. Now, you’re left wondering, “What happened? Why was that cart abandoned?”
Ecommerce marketers know this is more than just a lost sale—it’s a guessing game with no trace of intent. But with the right tools in place, you could get to the bottom of those issues (and bring shoppers back to complete their purchases.)
Wishlists are sometimes considered redundant in the face of saved online shopping carts. But when implemented strategically, they can lead to better visibility, smarter planning, and stronger brand-consumer relationships—not to mention recovered sales revenue.
Beneath the surface of every casual browsing experience, your shoppers are providing incredibly valuable information about what products they want. It’s easy to think of a wishlist as a “nice to have” upgrade, but without one, you’re leaving money on the table.
Wishlists make it easy for your customers to show you what they love in real-time. With a wishlist tool, you can use that intel to your advantage.
What’s more: Shoppers want brands to deliver these insights. When online shopping, 57% of millennials and 81% of Gen Z customers in the US expect personalized product recommendations in exchange for their loyalty. Knowing what your customers want and offering them relevant deals pays.
When a shopper can’t save items to a wishlist, they opt for a workaround. Here are some of the quirky things we observed people do on sites that don’t have a wishlist tool:
If your shopper wants to return, “I’ll come back to it later” can be a dangerous prospect, and there is one big problem with all of these workarounds—none of them leave you with any intel you can feed back into your marketing strategy.
Individually, these may seem insignificant, but you can see how quickly interest fades away when you don’t give shoppers any tools to follow through. A fuzzy trail of hope isn’t something you can track or capitalize on. Without a wishlist, your brand never becomes a part of their (or their device’s) long-term memory. Every time you don’t understand the intent behind your customers’ actions, these missed opportunities add up.
One thing is clear—capturing intent without a wishlist feature is going to get more difficult as third-party data becomes obsolete. If you can’t show shoppers that you care about their preferences and their privacy, they won’t stick around.
Let’s break down what’s at stake when shopper intent stays hidden:
A cookieless future without access to third-party data topped the list of marketing concerns worldwide. Combine that with rising customer expectations, and zero and first-party data become every marketer’s new best friend.
If you can’t see what your customers want, you can’t market to them in a way that feels personal, relevant, or timely. A wishlist gives you data about every customer’s shopping activity, history, and preferences, forming the basis for data-driven marketing decisions you can make with confidence.
Brands that can tap into wishlist data can drive inventory forecasting with more accuracy, simply by knowing what shoppers are already eyeing.
A saved cart offers only temporary storage, and we know that customer interests are ever-changing. Without a wishlist, you don’t have the context you need to offer personalized product recommendations.
This means you can’t follow up with tailored reminders, restock alerts, or “you might also like” nudges that actually land. Wishlists help you collect the data you need to enable this level of personalization, even at scale.
Your marketing is most powerful when personalized, and tools like Swym’s Wishlist Plus integrate with Shopify to help you not only collect the data you need to personalize your marketing, but also execute it effectively.
Even if a shopper really wants to buy a product, they likely won’t go through with it without a proper path to purchase. Without a wishlist, this high-intent demand is lost, and there’s no second shot at all the items they could have revisited.
Ecommerce revenue is tied to interest signals that keep you top of mind, and without FOMO builders, back-in-stock triggers, and limited-time offers, all you’re left with are lost shoppers and lost sales. Wishlists are set up to capture these interest signals from shoppers in real-time, so you can have the opportunity to capitalize on them and make sure the sale goes through.
The Block Zone is a great example to showcase how wishlist data leads to better product planning and see the impact of intent data in effect. The brand’s unique and complex building block model kits attracted a loyal customer base, and wishlist intelligence helped them boost sales.
Product-wise wishlist actions in their Swym reports helped the company pinpoint gaps, optimize their Product description pages, and create best-selling bundles based on their top wishlisted product data.
The company saw a 9X increase in conversions, a staggering 35% increase in AOV through wishlists, and an overall 6% lift in revenue. An effective wishlist strategy helped them capture interest and recover revenue that would’ve otherwise slipped away unnoticed.
With all the recent changes in marketing data collection laws, winning (or winning back) customers means one thing—putting them first.
When a shopper puts items in a cart, we can’t differentiate this move as a ‘maybe’, ‘now’, or ‘never’. On the other hand, wishlists let you track shopper intent and signal their purchase interest clearly. To put it bluntly, cart saves don’t give you any feedback loop, but with a wishlist, you can enable timely alerts, personalized recommendations, and remarketing.
Case in point: Princess Polly. As an on-trend fashion brand, Princess Polly delivers apparel and accessories that its customers love. And when its customers initially asked for a wishlist feature, it was only for the mobile app.
But when your customers live in the digital world, they expect a frictionless experience from wherever they’re browsing (be it desktop, mobile, or in-app.) By doing this, Princess Polly’s shoppers could create lists within the mobile app that synced with the website, ensuring a seamless shopping experience across all devices.
Wishlist Plus, with its Tapcart and Klaviyo integrations, enabled them to do just that. Within six months of implementation, Princess Polly saw wishlist engagement shoot up by almost 3X, alongside a 3.5% increase in average order size.
Boosting revisit rates with the wishlist functionality goes beyond sales in the short term. The ability to retain a shopper has the potential to boost each customer’s lifetime value, and in an unpredictable and fiercely competitive market, that is invaluable.
Wishlists are a must-have in 2025, as they give your brand a reliable source of truth for understanding what your customers care about, so you can plan smarter, market better, and build lasting loyalty.
Want to give wishlists a try on your Shopify store? Go with the most trusted Wishlist out there, Wishlist Plus.
Helping e-commerce brands craft a more seamless experience for their customers
