Wishlist eCommerce best practices

Running an ecommerce website is not an easy task. You have to take care of implementing a lot of best practices to establish trust with the visitors, entice them to view your products or services range, and finally, encourage them to take the leap of ordering from your store.

Ask yourself: Whats the primary reason people shop online? The answer is obvious. Because its easy and convenient! Without leaving the comfort of his or her living room or office, your customer can choose what to order and receive the product on theirdoorstep via your chosen delivery method.This can be gauged from the fact that Cyber Monday sales rose to a whopping $3.45BN.

With the holiday season approaching real fast, you should use every trick in the book to maximize your store revenue. There is a feature which you must offer on your ecommerce store to reduceshopping cart abandonment, and to attract visitors who would otherwise not visit your web store: A wishlist. This feature makes it easier for your customers to purchase from your store. How is that? Lets examine.

Dont Just Wish Upon a Star!

Yes, gone are the days when we used to look for the first star in the evening sky and wish for our desires to be granted. Things are more direct now. Lets say a teenager visits an ecommerce store, sees a product that he really wishes to buy, but he doesnt have a bank account, or he doesnt have enough money saved up to make the purchase. But, lucky for him, his birthday is just a couple of weeks away!

On the ecommerce website, he browses the products and adds them to a list he created using the built-in wishlist feature of the web store. When he is done adding products to his list, he shares its link with his family members: his dad, mom, sister, and grandma. [And of course, he shares it with his tech-savvy friends as well.]

This list helps those who will be giving him gifts. It provides the list of things hed appreciate as gifts for his birthday. Its highly likely that these people may purchase one or more of those products from your store. Because, obviously, the wishlist was made using products listed on your store. It brought users to your store who would otherwise not have visited your ecommerce site.

Visitors to ecommerce websites falling under any demographic will appreciate a wishlist feature. Whenever a life event happens, such as birthdays, cultural and religious holidays, or any other celebration where a person may expect gifts, they could come to your store and create a wishlist to share with those who will be buying the gifts.

How to Get the Most out of Wishlist Feature

As theowner of the web store, you should try to push all the features to your shoppers. Read the points below, and make sure to include these in your marketing efforts for the Wishlist feature. Lets see the advantages of this feature for all parties.

Visitors

A visitor, who cannot immediately make a purchase, can save a Wishlistand return to it later. The visitor will not have to search for their favorite products once again. This is especially advantageous for those browsing from a mobile device.

If a visitor is creating a Wishlist to share with their family and friends, they will ensure that the gifts they receive will be something they desire, as opposed to unwanted gifts.

Gift-givers

The person buying an item from the wishlist to gift someone else, will know their money is not being wasted, because theyre buying something their loved one really wants.

Web Store Owners

If you are a part of a dev-and-design team building an ecommerce website for a customer, you can convince them to include a Wishlist by informing them of the following advantages:

• Wishlists will help you pinpoint popular items in your inventory. This is a source of valuable market research. Youll know which products have the potential for increased demand, by merely attracting certain types of visitors to your website.
• The person visiting your store to buy an item from a wishlistmay end up becoming a regular customer themselves. Word-of-Mouth marketing and referrals from friends are a strong factor in turning visitors into customers.

Better Ecommerce Experience

Theres no doubt that including the Wishlist feature will provide an improved ecommerce experience for your visitors. Not all of them will use it, but it will help bring referral traffic to your web store. Here well take an example of an ecommerce site, ModCloth. Look at the footeron the homepage, it contains a link to Wishlists.

The product page itself also has the Add to Wishlist button.

Be creative

Use the Wishlist feature to increase your sales. Offer free delivery if someone purchases multiple items from a Wishlist on a single order. Give the user an option to email their wishlist to their family and friends, but make sure that the email doesnt appear spammy. Manage user attitudes towards wishlists through your marketing.
I am sure you will see an impact on your sales if you implement this feature properly.

What more can you do this holiday season?

Choose your most valuable customers and gift them some of the items from their Wishlists. The restwill be history.

Wishlists Work If Your Website Loads Quickly

Apart from all of the above, it also helps if your website loads fast and doesnt crash when there is a spike in traffic. There is no use of building a wishlist if you are not able to sustain a number of visitors to your website. The holiday season is a season of gifting. Therefore, you can expect a lot of wishlists being exchanged between the users. This is why your ecommerce web hosting solution provideris an important factor in your web stores success.