Blog HomeIn this post, discover how wishlist and back-in-stock features can boost sales and average order values for fashion brands—including real-world wishlist feature success stories.
A shopper’s thumb hovers over the Add to Cart button on their phone. They adore the distressed jeans they’re about to purchase, but they’re not 100% certain about ordering. They tap over to add to wishlist instead, adding it to their wishlist. No transaction for now.
Then, a week later, a notification. Those jeans you saved are calling your name! Now, the shopper is more certain about wanting that particular pair of jeans. Tap. Purchase. Oh, and maybe a scarf to go along with it, too. Many fashion brands have struggled to recognize how wishlist features can drive sales like these. Convenient for customers? Sure. Even so, tools like wishlist reminders and back-in-stock alerts don’t always “feel” like powerful marketing tools.
But they are. Ecommerce websites with wishlist features have 30% higher conversion rates. We’ve even seen wishlist features help produce $13 million in revenue over the course of a year.
Wishlist features aren’t just convenient for fashion and apparel shoppers. They drive sales for a lot of reasons: gathering customer data, personalizing your sales, and offering back-in-stock alerts like in the scenario above. And it’s not just theoretical. Real-world fashion brands have used these features to drive revenue. Here’s how.
When you shop for clothes online, wishlists are part of the everyday experience. Customers tap Add to Wishlist when they want to watch for price drops or receive a ping when a hot item is back in stock. They also might “wishlist” items to curate gift ideas or build entire outfits.
From a fashion brand’s perspective, benefits extend far beyond Save For Later:
If you use these features with specific goals in mind, you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve. That’s especially true for fashion companies, where wishlists help reveal popular items and clothing trends.
Willow Boutique, a clothing brand selling the Nashville-country aesthetic, was in the process of building a new tech stack. Could they find new ways to connect with customers?
Willow already had a wishlist in place. However, adding more robust features could help Willow Boutique improve flows like wishlist restock alerts and cart abandonment. Saving an item to a wishlist with a simple “heart” icon wasn’t keeping enough customers around.
Willow’s marketers browsed the web for solutions. As it turned out, some of their favorite brands used Wishlist Plus. That seemed like a better way to leverage customer data and drive better marketing ROI.
Willow added a new tech stack to the mix. Now, with Wishlist Plus and native Yotpo integration, they could connect their workflows to customer email systems.
The results were immediate. Thanks to the convenient wishlist-to-Yotpo SMS and email marketing flows, the boutique saw a 100X return when they combined wishlist data with more targeted and effective product marketing. Adding more wishlist features (price drop and back-in-stock alerts, for example) also resulted in a 2X increase in their customers’ AOV.
Their marketing improved, but Willow Boutique improved their other numbers, too. One long-time challenge: high rates of customers deleting products from their cart. A new “Save for Later” feature helped Willow recover 15% of those deleted items, recapturing once-lost revenue.
Popflex is a workout-wear brand searching for a way to add subscribers to its email list. It especially wanted to dial into its customers’ existing preferences. If it could, Popflex could use that data to craft targeted, resonant marketing messages to its budding list of subscribers. Cue their “Wishlist Giveaway” campaign. Similar to an online shopping spree giveaway, Popflex built a contest where customers could win Popflex products in their wishlist with a total value of up to $1,000.
“All you have to do?” asked the marketing copy. “Build your wishlist.”
Customers got busy doing exactly that. If they didn’t already have a wishlist, they signed up. Soon, Popflex had over 45,000 new customers. All the while, the brand learned what these customers wanted: if customers had $1,000 to spend, what would be their first priority? What were the products customers simply couldn’t live without?
Using this new wishlist data, Popflex could segment its customers and personalize future campaigns. Their Wishlist Plus integration worked with Klaviyo to send this new customer wishlist intelligence directly into their email marketing features.
With new customers signing up and sending product data via the wishlist, Popflex registered over 90,000 people throughout its entire Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaign.
Tibi, a women’s luxury brand, wanted to support customers with back-in-stock alerts. But when you’re as established and far-reaching as Tibi is, product inventory can tend to get a bit complicated.
Tibi needed a way to connect local warehouse inventory data with local customers. So the brand integrated Swym’s back-in-stock alerts (including multi-location support) with Klaviyo. Now Tibi could measure inventory levels by individual warehouse locations. If a store was ready to fulfill a local customer’s wishlist, that customer would receive the alert.
Thanks to the Klaviyo integration, the alerts maintained Tibi’s consistent branding. Since they’ve been established as a luxury brand since the 1990s, that’s part of the allure of shopping at Tibi. Alerts remained true to the brand while the content of the alerts remained personalized to shopper locations.
The result was a 13% higher AOV through the app. Tibi boosted customer engagement, and those who did receive the alerts were four times as likely to convert, which helped drive higher online revenue.
The temptation is to view wishlists and back-in-stock alerts as customer-centric benefits. They’re convenient for customers, brands figure, but do they help make sales?
They do, but not due to one specific reason. There are a few reasons fashion brands will see results like the ones we highlighted above:
To get more out of your wishlist features, consider giving your store more than a “save for later” feature. Today’s fashion customers want more than that. Consider adding the Wishlist App to give your customers more reasons to build their entire wardrobe with your wishlist functionality.
Helping e-commerce brands craft a more seamless experience for their customers
