How to Add Non-Amazon Items to a Wishlist

You started an Amazon wishlist because it took ninety seconds. Then you wanted the boots from a brand's own shop, the board game your local store carries, a print from a small maker, and a gift card to the restaurant down the street. None of those are on Amazon, and now you have a list that represents about half of what you actually want.

This is the single most common wishlist problem, and there are exactly three ways out of it. Two of them are workarounds. One of them is just using a different kind of list.

There are three options: keep several store lists, fake it with placeholder items, or use a universal list that isn't owned by a retailer. Only the third holds up once more than one person is shopping, because separate lists can't tell each other what's already been bought. A universal list stores each item as a link to wherever it's sold, so the Amazon item and the small-shop item sit side by side.

Why a store's wishlist can't hold outside items

It helps to understand why this isn't an oversight. A retailer's wishlist is a merchandising feature. It exists to keep what you want inside their catalog until you or someone else buys it. Items are rows pointing at their own product IDs, and the list is wired into their cart, their reviews, their recommendations, and their purchase tracking.

An arbitrary link from another store has none of that. There's no product ID, no price feed, no purchase signal, no way to mark it bought. A store could support it, but supporting it well means building an entirely different product, and pointing customers at competitors is not a feature anyone's roadmap prioritizes.

So the constraint is structural, not a missing setting. Once you accept that, the options get clearer.

Option 1: Keep multiple lists

The obvious move: an Amazon list, a Target list, an Etsy favorites collection, and a note in your phone for everything else.

This works in the narrow sense that every item ends up saved somewhere. It falls apart the moment someone else needs to use it:

• You have to send four links. Every person who asks "what do you want?" gets a small homework assignment, and most will only open the first one.
• Nothing coordinates across lists. Amazon's list doesn't know your aunt bought the item on your Target list. Duplicates get more likely, not less, because the group's attention is split.
• The phone note is invisible. Whatever lives there is effectively not on a list at all.

Multiple lists are fine if you're the only one who reads them. As soon as gifting is involved, the split is the problem.

Option 2: Fake it inside the store list

People get creative here. The two common tricks:

• Add a placeholder item. Find something on the retailer roughly like what you want, add it, and put the real thing in the note field. Now the list shows a photo of the wrong product, and a gifter who doesn't read notes buys the wrong thing. This backfires often enough that it isn't worth the trouble.
• Use a browser button or extension. Retailers have offered add-from-anywhere browser tools at various points, and their availability and behavior have changed repeatedly over the years — some have been retired, some work only on certain sites, and what shows up on the list is often a bare link with no image or price. If you want to try this route, check what your retailer currently offers rather than trusting a tutorial written three years ago.

Both options are trying to make a single-store list do something it was built not to do.

Option 3: Use a list that isn't owned by a store

The third option is to stop starting from a retailer. A universal wishlist is just a list where each item is a pointer to wherever that thing is sold, rather than a row in one store's catalog. The Amazon item and the small-shop item sit next to each other because neither one is special.

Mechanically, adding an item is: paste the product URL, and the list pulls in the photo, title, and price so it looks like a real product card instead of a naked link. For things with no useful link — a specific board game from a shop with a bad website, "a box of tissues," a contribution toward something bigger — you scan the barcode with your phone or just type the item in.

On EZWishlist this is the default behavior rather than a workaround, and the part that matters for gifting comes free: friends and family claim an item in two taps without creating an account, claimed items are marked taken so nobody doubles up, and claims are anonymous so you don't learn who's getting you what. One link covers every store.

Does this cost the gifter anything?

No, and this is the part people ask about most.

The list never handles the money. When someone claims your item, they click through to whichever store sells it and check out there like any other purchase — same price, same account, same shipping, same return policy. A universal list is a coordination layer sitting above the stores, not a middleman sitting between them.

That also means a gifter isn't locked to the store you linked. If they find the same item cheaper, prefer a local shop, or already have a gift card somewhere else, they can buy it there and still mark it claimed. The link tells them what, not where.

Which one should you pick?

• If you're saving things for yourself and nobody else will read the list, multiple store lists are fine. Don't overthink it.
• If more than one person will shop from your list, use a universal list. The split-list problem gets worse with every extra gifter, and duplicates are the specific thing that goes wrong. (Here's the longer version of why.)
• If you're already deep into a store registry and it's working, you don't have to abandon it. Plenty of people keep the registry for the big items and use a universal list for everything the store doesn't carry.

What to check before you commit

Whatever you choose, three questions decide whether the list actually works when it's time to give:

1. Can gifters claim without making an account? Every signup screen loses people, and the ones you lose are usually the relatives you most wanted to make it easy for.
2. Do you find out who claimed what? If yes, your surprise is gone. Anonymous claims are what let coordination and surprise coexist.
3. What happens to an abandoned claim? If someone calls dibs and never buys, an item that stays locked forever is worse than no claim system at all. Claims should expire and free the item back up.

Get those three right and it stops mattering which store an item came from — which was the whole problem you started with.