eBay have added their latest social media feature in the form of Wish Lists which can be shared on Facebook or via email. If you’ve got items you want for a particular event such as Christmas, a wedding or your birthday you can even swap to a themed banned to appear on your wishlist page.
New on eBay are wish list links on all listings alongside the bid/buy button making it a more visible section of the site. A single click will allow you to add a new item to your wish list. Once the item is added all you then need to do is to decide how to share the list with your friends, family and anyone that might be kind enough to splash some cash from their PayPal account and make a purchase for you!
Once you’ve on eBay sharing via Facebook is then easy in just two clicks and from then on your wish list items will be posted onto you Facebook account, if you want to share via email then you can add up to 20 email addresses to have your list sent out to.
What surprises me though is that eBay haven’t added the ability for a friend to buy on your behalf. Sure they can buy the item but there’s no way currently for them to automatically ship to your address, mark the item as purchased on your wish list so that no one else buys it for you, and automatically notify you that the item is on it’s way. If you go creating a wedding wish list be prepared for all your friends to buy you the same tin opener!
It’s not perfect, but for a first stab at wish lits it’s not bad. The list sharing is ok, but not brilliant – if you add new items to your wish list or change the theme you’ll need to repost your list to Facebook or resend manually via email to let your friends now your list is updated. However it’s a start and if gets a few more sales over the Christmas holiday period that’s ok by me!
One Response
Have you heard of eBay’s Group Gifts? I’ve never tried it but I’d recommend it.
Last summer I came up with a great idea for an eBay affiliate site shortly after eBay made wish lists available. I had dreams of it winning me another Star Developer Award and even an X Developer Award. Users would sign up and link their eBay accounts. Then whenever they added anything to their eBay wish list (or any custom list they chose) it would automatically show up in Facebook and/or tweet it along with a link to my site (required by ePN for affiliate credit). They could then visit eBay, buy the item, and have the seller send it to their friend. The drawback is that they’d need to know their friends address and setup PayPal to do this.
What I really wanted though was to use the PayPal API to let friends pool their money and let the user buy it but pay with their pool of money. I didn’t quite have that part figured out (no 3rd party checkout allowed) but I was just about to begin writing the app. I already had the perfect domain name for the project. Then I checked Twitter and saw a tweet from eBay’s corporate blogger pointing to eBay’s new Group Gifts feature which is pretty much what I had in mind. The only difference is it was integrated into the site and probably uses private APIs I never had access to.