Amazon’s Wish List… Success!

Amazon just gave me something high on my wish list of improvements to their website. They recently added the ability to drag and drop the items in your wish list to reorder the list. I’d like to think it was all due to my December 20^th, 2013 blog post, Amazon’s Wish List Problem, but in reality, it was probably something they had intended to do for a long time.

Previously, Amazon placed your most recently added products at the top of your wish list. As you can imagine, gift givers tend to notice and buy the items toward the top of the list rather than the items far down the page. Although Amazon provided the ability to add comments and indicate your priorities next to each item, those descriptions were easy to overlook.

As a result, the only way to move items to the top of your wish list was an awkward workaround of clicking into the product page for the items you wanted at the top of the list and clicking Add to Wish List again, which moved those items at the top of your wish list.

Now, with the recent improvements, Amazon added handles next to each item on your wish list, which appear on rollover to indicate that you can drag and drop a product to another position (as shown in Figure 1).

 

Dragging items around the list is an extremely easy and natural way to rearrange your list. To make it easier to move items far down the list, they also added a “Top” link that moves the item to the top of the list with one click (as shown in Figure 2).

Both of these changes are great improvements, providing absolute control over the order of the items in your wish list. So thank you, Amazon, for giving me the item on the top of my wish list!