Building a Shopify wishlist with no app required — feedback welcome

Community Feedback
1

I’ve been working on a wishlist that runs directly in Shopify — no wishlist app required.

So far I’ve got:

  • Multiple wishlists

  • Product variants

  • Add to wishlist from product cards

  • List management

  • Cross-device syncing

It’s still very much a work in progress, which is why I’ve started documenting the build rather than waiting until everything is finished.

What I’d love feedback on

For those of you building Shopify themes or storefront experiences:

What would you consider essential before calling a wishlist feature complete?

I’m especially interested in anything you think merchants would genuinely use rather than features that just look good on a checklist.

Developer Diary #1

I recorded a walkthrough of where the build is currently at:

Curious to hear what other Shopify developers think of the direction so far.

2

At the 7 minute mark, the video discusses the information is stored with the customer, and I think this is what most people will be curious about.

It is great that it would be available for agencies and freelance dev’s to add to client stores, but unfortunately Shopify will not allow ‘app like features’ in any Theme Store theme. If so, this would be a game changer!

3

Hey Ian.

Correct, I have gotten many messages from people saying it can’t be done, and I think your video is a gimmick, but also many messages from people with positive support, which is what I was hoping to see.

Yeah, Shopify is even against having a browser-saved stat feature, which I think is a shame because it is the number one asked-for feature. I can’t really openly share how I have this working because once I do, everyone will copy it and immediately start selling it. Kinda like how all the 3rd-party theme copycats do this already.

When Clean Canvas launched Enterprise, it only took a few months to see others taking features we added and copying them to their own themes. They were so lazy about it that they accidentally left in a link to our support page instead of theirs and didn’t even change the help text. It was a 1-to-1 direct match.

So because of this, the cards will be held close to my chest on this one. But I can say it can be done with the tools in Shopify available to everyone on every plan.

4

I think you’ll get higher chances to get answers on other channels like reddit.

5

I haven’t used it enough and it seems I need a Karma of 10 to post over these. So I gotta work on that and then maybe I can post these diaries over there.

6

There are many shopify related sub-reddits! Some let you post without karma, you’ll reach different audience