How to add a wishlist to your Shopify store

Most shoppers don’t buy on their first visit. They’re comparing, waiting for payday, or just not ready — and if there’s no way to save what caught their eye, that interest evaporates when they close the tab. A wishlist captures it instead. Shopify doesn’t offer one natively, so here’s how to add save-for-later and, more importantly, how to turn those saves back into sales.

Shopify has no native wishlist

There’s no built-in “save for later” on the Shopify storefront — on any plan, Basic through Plus, and there’s no admin setting called “wishlist.” The usual workarounds don’t hold up:

• “Just bookmark it” — nobody does, and you capture nothing.
• Leave it in the cart — carts are for buying now, they clear, and an abandoned cart is a different (and blunter) tool.
• Account-only “saved items” — even where a theme bolts a saved list into the logged-in customer account, it’s gated behind a login (so you lose the signed-out majority) and sends no reminders.

So without an app, a shopper who isn’t ready to buy has no way to come back to a specific product — and you have no record that they ever wanted it.

How to add a wishlist to your Shopify store

There are two routes, and for almost everyone the second one is the real answer.

Build it yourself (hard, and rarely worth it). The storefront can’t write saves on its own: Liquid can read a customer metafield but can’t write one, so a DIY wishlist means JavaScript plus either the Storefront API or an app proxy to persist saves. A pure localStorage version works for guests with no backend, but it’s locked to one device and vanishes the moment the shopper clears their browser — and none of these routes send a price-drop or restock reminder, which is the part that actually recovers sales.

Install a wishlist app (the practical path). Once it’s installed, you add the heart to your theme in the editor — no code:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes and click Customize on your live theme (the heart block needs an Online Store 2.0 theme).
2. Open a product page in the editor, click Add block, choose the wishlist app’s Save for later block, and drop it next to the “Add to cart” button.
3. Add the app’s My saved items block to a page (e.g. a dedicated “My wishlist” page) so shoppers can see what they saved.
4. Click Save.

The point of a wishlist isn’t the list — it’s the reminders

Adding a heart button is the easy part. The value is what you do with a save:

• A saved item is a stated intent. The shopper told you they want this product. That’s a far warmer signal than a page view.
• Changes are your opening. When a saved item drops in price, or a sold-out saved item comes back in stock, that’s the moment to nudge the shopper back — and because they already raised their hand, a single, well-timed reminder converts much better than a broad campaign.

The thing to get right is restraint and reliability: reminders only to people who opted in, and exactly one timely, correct reminder per event — not a repeated nudge or an alert for something that’s still sold out. The mechanics matter as much as the idea.

Guests vs logged-in shoppers

Most of the people worth capturing aren’t logged in, so where a wishlist stores saves matters:

• Guests — a save is kept on the shopper’s device (browser localStorage), so they can heart something with zero signup friction. The trade-off is honest: it’s tied to that device and that browser.
• Logged-in shoppers — the list is tied to the customer, so it follows them across phone and desktop, and you have a reliable way to reach them with a reminder.

A good wishlist does both — captures the guest save instantly on the device, and gives logged-in shoppers an account-tied list that follows them across devices — rather than forcing an account before anyone can save.

The fix: Wishwell

Wishwell adds save-for-later to your store through theme blocks — a heart on product pages and a “My saved items” block — and works for both guests (saved on the device) and logged-in shoppers (an account-tied list that follows them across devices). Then it does the valuable half automatically: when a saved item drops in price or comes back in stock, it sends the shopper one win-back email — opt-in, deduplicated, and tied to the product they actually saved.

Pricing is flat — no per-shopper or per-save fees. The free plan includes 100 reminder emails a month, and Pro (€19/mo) makes them unlimited, so a growing wishlist doesn’t grow your bill.

If your focus is specifically the sold-out case, a dedicated back-in-stock alert (Restockwell) covers that for every shopper, not only the ones who saved — the two work well together.