Why Amazon's wishlist is not the answer
Amazon's list works well for Amazon. Its add-from-any-site button has been unreliable for years and drops a lot of shops silently — which is worse than failing loudly, because you find out months later that half your list is empty.
Every shop's own wishlist has the same shape of problem: it is designed to keep you on that shop, so working elsewhere is not something it is trying to do.
The two properties that decide it
Almost every tool in this category looks the same on its landing page. Two things separate the ones that still work in six months.
- Does it capture the price at the moment you saved it? Without that you cannot tell whether something went up before a sale.
- Does the item still render if the shop changes or deletes the page? Tools that only store a bookmark leave you with a wall of dead links and no titles.
Test the phone flow before anything else
Many of these are browser-extension-first, which makes them effectively desktop-only — and the moment you actually want to save something is usually on a phone, inside an app's own browser.
Before you commit a list to anything, save one item from your phone. If that path is awkward, the tool will not survive contact with real use, however good the desktop version is.
Check what happens to a private list
Some of these are social products with a list feature attached, which means your list is public or semi-public by default and feeds somebody's recommendations. That may be fine. It is worth knowing before rather than after.
The question to ask is what happens when you share one item: does the person you sent it to see just that, or do they land on a profile showing everything else you have saved? For a birthday present, that difference matters quite a lot.
What "works with every shop" actually means
No tool genuinely reads every shop. What separates them is what happens when extraction fails — and it will, because some shops block automated fetches outright and others hide their prices behind scripts.
The useful question is whether you can still save the thing by hand when that happens: a title you type, a photo you upload, the link. A tool that refuses the item entirely has made a shop's anti-bot configuration into your problem. One that falls back to a manual entry has not.
Export, before you need it
A wishlist you have fed for two years is worth something, and these products come and go. Check whether you can get your list out as a file — a CSV, a JSON dump, anything. If there is no way to export, you are one shutdown notice away from re-collecting everything by hand.