Wishlisting Blog

Wishpot was selected as one of the 10 finalists in the Social Shopping category for Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Please vote for us!

As some of you may have seen a few weeks ago, Wishlisting has been acquired by Wishpot. John and I are very excited about joining the Wishpot team and helping to create the best social shopping experience on the web.

To our Wishlisting users, don’t worry, there are no plans for it to go away. In fact, you may have noticed the increase in the number of stores we support for price drop notifications. This is because we’re working on leveraging some of the same technologies for both sites.

While some of our users have enjoyed the simplicity of the “have it” and “want it” options on Wishlisting, others have asked for more sophisticated options such as the ability to create and manage multiple wishlists for different things. We’d encourage you to check out Wishpot if you’re looking for some of those more advanced features. Thank you all for your support! As always, feel free to send in comments with questions, suggestions, and feedback.

Last week on June 11th I celebrated my birthday, and a user added Wishlisting’s 10,000th wish. Thanks to everyone who’s been enjoying the site. We’ve gone on to bump up the number of stores we support price fetches at considerably, so hopefully you’re finding lots of great deals!

Many thanks to Kellie at Never Shopped Out for a great review of Wishlisting.

Just released today, price drop notifications are now active on your wishlists. There is a new option on your settings page which allows you to adjust the frequency with which you’ll be notified about price drops (or turn them off altogether).

We designed this feature to be as simple as possible. There aren’t a ton of options to configure - you just decide how often you want to be notified. It works like this:

1. Every day Wishlisting’s spider goes out and checks for price updates on wishes across the site. It doesn’t search stuff you have, just stuff you want.
2. If we find the price is substantially lower than it was when you found it first, we’ll notify you.
3. We won’t notify you again on that item until the price drops again, to a price that was substantially lower than the last price we e-mailed you about.
4. If multiple items on your wishlist drop in price, they’ll be grouped together in a single e-mail.

So… what does “substantially lower” mean? For the time being, it means:

• A 25% drop (or more) in price for wishes under $100 ($1 minimum)
• A 10% drop (or more) in price for wishes over $100

We’ve done some testing and found that this seems to weed out price drops that aren’t interesting, and keep the e-mail down to a minimum. Hopefully the only mail you’ll get is useful mail. In the future, we may make all of this configurable. For now, the feature is dead simple. So… please let us know what you think!

This week we moved all of Wishlisting from MediaTemple to Joyent. Long story short, this should alleviate some of the errors people have encountered while using the site, particularly during busy hours.

Secondly you may have noticed that, as of April 1st, birthday reminder e-mails were sent (if any of your friends have April birthdays). The approach we took is that, once a month, we’ll batch up all of your friends who’s birthdays are coming up and send them to you in one summary e-mail. This way you won’t get inundated with messages about every single person’s birthday, which is what some sites do. If your birthday is coming up, we’ll give you a reminder ahead of time to update your wishlist if you have friends who are keeping an eye on your birthday.

If you’d like to turn any of this off, you can do so under the “Your settings” section and simply uncheck “Enable monthly birthday reminders.”

Another feature that is just about to pop are the e-mail price drop notifications. Currently wishlisting tracks price drops at 30 of the most popular stores where people are adding wishes. You can see this happening when looking at items on your wishlist:

These are updated on a regular basis, but currently don’t get e-mailed to you. Well, it has become obvious that the site has found some sweet bargains, and the option to be notified by e-mail would be incredibly useful. That feature is coming very shortly, and I’ll write another blog post about the details of how it works when it’s ready.

As one of our European users pointed out, although we offer multi-currency support in the items on your wishlist, some of it wasn’t working quite right. We recently released some updates so that our wishes can all live in peace, regardless of where you find them.

The way this works is pretty simple. If you find something in Euros (say, at amazon.fr) it will show up, as you’d expect, in Euros on your wishlist.

Now, we’ll make sure not to average/mix up the currencies on you. You’ll notice the price is only from “1 store.” That’s because it has only been found from one store in that currency. If you’re interested in seeing the prices in other currencies (likely from stores in other countries) you can still see them all in the pricing table further down the page.

Wishlisting is far from perfect from an internationalization perspective (ex. everything defaults to US Dollars everywhere on the site) but hopefully these fixes will help make individual wishlists usable amongst friends anywhere.

Thanks to user metamatik for the suggestions!

Although we keep your Amazon wishlists up to date by checking them every 24 hours, sometimes people want the instant gratification of adding or removing something from their Amazon list and see it reflected in Wishlisting instantly. Yesterday, we added a button so you can do that if you like:

It’s located right on your settings page, alongside the other Amazon-related options. When you click it, it goes out and checks your Amazon wishlist, updating your items at Wishlisting. Thanks to users indyjones and dayvi for requesting it.

Hi all!

Some of you may have noticed a few changes around wishlisting recently. Just in time for the holidays, there have been a number of things of interest changing around the site. A few highlights:

	The new “email my wishlist” feature allows you to send your wishlist to friends and family with a click of a button.
	For logged in users, the home page has been collapsed such that the most interesting stuff is near the top.
	A revamped help section is easier on the eyes, with more pictures and less words.
	There’s a bunch of new icon eye-candy to draw your attention to certain overlooked aspects of the site

In addition, you’ll find a table of your friends’ recent activity in the friends section, which really makes that area a whole lot more interesting. We’ve also added the ability to be notified on a monthly basis when your friends are having birthdays, and we’ll send you links to their wishlists. We’re continually adding the ability to do price-fetches at new stores as well, so you should start to see more and more of your wishes show up with updated prices automatically.

Almost all of these changes have come based on feedback from our users, so please continue to send it in!

Marcelo Calbucci, the founder of Sampa produces a monthly list chronicling tech startups in Seattle, and ranking them according to their ratings in Alexa and Compete. These ratings are notoriously inaccurate, but most people consider them “better than nothing” and it’s cool to see all of the startups tracked in a single list.

This month Wishlisting is up to 90 from 98 (when we first joined the list). The list has also grown to 210 companies up from 188 last month.

For those of you in the Seattle Tech Startup scene, I’d recommend subscribing to Marcelo’s feed. It doesn’t barrage you with updates, but you get pinged whenever a new startup joins the list, and he occasionally sends out messages about local events. If Marcelo’s name sounds familiar but you can’t pinpoint it, he was the one who gave a great talk about using AJAX to trap JavaScript exceptions at Ignite Seattle several months ago.