Organizing Your Amazon Wish List

*Originally published on 3/28/11



Building a wish list on Amazon is quite enjoyable. It's fun looking for things that you may want to buy in the future and it acts as a good motivator in terms of working as it gives you something to aim for. As with anything else, you'll want to try and apply some sort of system to your list, lest it become unruly. The question is, how can you go about doing this?

Amazon does provide you with some sorting options, though they aren't quite as helpful as one would hope. The default mode just goes by the date you added the item. This makes some sense as it keeps the newer items at the top. You can also sort it by price (either high to low or low to high). You can also prioritize the items on your list, by noting how much you want a certain item. This is grants you some control over how the list is sorted, but even this has shortcomings.

Recently, Amazon added a feature that allowed you to create multiple wish lists. At first, I figured this function was superfluous. What would be the point in breaking my wish list up in to smaller "mini-lists"? I figured it was better to keep it all consolidated. However, once your wish list starts to hit item totals in the hundreds, or even thousands, that feature becomes far more appealing.

This grants you the greatest degree of control as you can sort your list however you want. The categories are yours to choose and you can scroll through your wish list and transfer them over in such a way that all similar items are clustered together and items that are meant to be purchased in a specific sequence can be organized as such.

This is especially helpful if you are a comics fan like I am. Trade paperbacks make up a large portion of my wish list, as such, this tool not only allowed me to grant them their own section, but it also enabled me to group all of the books together in their respective titles. Of course, once I passed that initial step, than I fell in to the same pitfalls, as new trades are released and kept separate from the rest of their ilk.

A "click and drag" feature would be pretty cool, allowing you to move items up and down your list at will. At first, I thought that it would only limit you to moving items on individual pages, but that could be solved by adding "move item to next page" and "move item to previous page" buttons.

My guess is that the issue is so oddly specific that it isn't worth the trouble for them. Then again, I suppose you could apply that principle to movie or book series as well. I don't know, it would still be a cool feature.

Considering you can just buy the items in said order, it probably isn't that big a deal, but it helps to have everything organized.

You'd think that this would be a good way to sort of trim the fat from your list; that going through your list to categorize them would grant you an opportunity to delete items you no longer want. That may be the case, but with me, the opposite held true. Once I had everything moved to where I wanted it, I found that I ended up adding more items afterwards as each individual list was smaller, thus allowing me to go browse for even more stuff. At the end of the day, it's harmless, but if you are one who strives to one day acquire all the items on your wish list, thus knocking the total count down to zero, it can be a bit vexing.

With most wish lists, this is a moot point. If your wish list is only a page or two, than organizing it really isn't worth the hassle, but for shopaholics and collectors in general, organization for things such as this can be a great boon. While the site doesn't grant you total control over the item order, you can find ways to tweak it and set it up so that the set up is a bit more to your liking.