Should I have a wishlist on my website?

The standard eCommerce wishlist enables customers to select desired items and dump them into a holding pen for purchase at a later date. As a merchant, these lists enable you to view the items placed there and use the information for your own inventory, pricing, and marketing purposes. This small bit of psychographic data helps you understand what your customers want, in advance, and can thus help refine and personalize your retargeting efforts.

Should you offer wishlist functionality in your eCommerce store? Lets consider.

Wishlists Can Be a Big Help

Wishlists provide many benefits. They engage your shopper, give him something to do, and as you probably know, every time a shopper actively interacts with your store your probability of a conversion increases. They also give him the feeling that hes an organized, savvy, and rational shopper coming back to an item a month later and buying it, particularly if the price has dipped, makes him feel like hes a good shopper and its a good purchase.

Wishlists also enhance brand loyalty since putting something in a wishlist gives a shopper an automatic reason to return to your store. And they give you a legitimate reason to recontact the shopper with price or product updates, promotional discounts, low inventory warnings, new reviews, or with similar/complementary products.

Finally, they provide you some small but interesting psychographic data. Not only do they give you information on what your shoppers want, they can also tell you about how a shopper sees herself because these are wishes, aspirational she is essentially shopping without restriction.

But They do Have Some Downside

Shoppers will sometimes save an item to a wishlist and forget about it. Worse, youve spent time and effort to stimulate in a shopper the urge to buy a particular product, and if she ends up satisfying that urge by saving rather than purchasing youre left out in the cold. At the end of the day a marketers task is to drive sales, not wishes.

Nonetheless, these downsides are pretty small compared to the benefits. Overall, wishlists provide you valuable, actionable information. So you should provide them, right?

Not so fast. We have a better answer: Cues My List.

What is Cues My List, and How is it Better?

My List is Cues proprietary version of an enhanced wishlist. It provides all of the same functionality as the standard wishlistbut much, much more. My List adds convenience to your shoppers experience, increasing adoption of My List, and in return provides you broad and deep psychographic data. Data that you can easily act on to reach a number of marketing and sales goals.

My List enables shoppers to save any product from your entire catalog that they are interested in to a central basket on your site. From that basket/page they can directly communicate with their friends and colleagues on social media, and you can capture all of this activity.

So: My List removes the friction from social sharing [which is free marketing and increased reach for you], and you now can see all this communication from all channels, meaning you now know your shoppers actual product interests and you know her friends interests. You can use this info for targeting, retargeting, segmenting, personalization of marketing messaging, and creation of user-generated reviews and endorsements. You can also set up live price alerts to notify your shoppers of special offers or discounts.

My List = Wishlist 2.0

As you can see, My List is far more powerful than the standard wishlist. It makes shopping easier and more fun for your shoppers, and encourages them to share with their friends, while at the same time providing you with deep psychographic information necessary to truly refine, personalize, and optimize every step of your shoppers experience.

Watch a quick demo and see how you can leverage your shoppers deep psychographic information and make your eCommerce store more profitable.

Originally published at blog.cueconnect.com.