I started my wishlist site reviews by simply glancing over the user interface of each site… just to get a feel for how they looked. Many times (especially as a web developer), you can tell how well a site will work without ever clicking anything. But to be fair, I will still sign up for and attempt to use all of them. This is, after all, a survey to find the best… not merely the most popular.
I will, however, begin with the site that already boasts the most traffic, Kaboodle. I don’t want to announce a winner from the start, but I have to say, if I wasn’t doing a survey, I would stop here. Although some functions were a little difficult to find, it provided almost everything I was looking for.
As it seems many of the other sites do as well, Kaboodle focuses on community / social shopping. Although I really don’t care too much for this in a wishlist site, I suppose it doesn’t hurt. Kaboodle allows you to have personal tags (labels which describe the individual), as well as a profile picture, and a short “about me” section. You can also enter your birthday and location. There is a “style compatibility test”, which is based on your ratings of product types. This seems to me to be more of a marketing ploy than anything else. There’s also friends, groups, email, and comments, as any social networking site should have. I liked that they give the ability to set up surveys, so that people can recommend products to you. Enough on the social aspect.
The Wishlist
After a cluttered initial interface (with all the social / shopping stuff), I was surprised to find that the wishlist itself had most of the features I was looking for. You can create multiple different types of lists (screenshot below), along with privacy settings for each one (desired features a & b). You can either make lists public or private, and you give access to the private lists by way of email.
The nicest thing about Kaboodle’s wishlist is importing items into it. You can either enter an item manually, or insert a URL and let Kaboodle gather all the related info it can. This allows you to enter items that you might not have a link for, or items that you want but may not even be aware exist yet (feature c). I was very impressed with Kaboodle’s import feature (screenshot below). It gathers a good amount of information (including pictures, title, descriptions, highlights) for a variety of different URLs I entered. The only thing missing here was a couple more well-defined fields, such as “approximate price” (however, you can use the general fields for whatever you’d like)(d). There’s also browser integration in the form of a cool little button that’ll grab whatever URL you’re on, and start the import function. At first, I didn’t notice the link that allows you to import an Amazon wishlist (i), but it’s there as well.
Kaboodle’s integration with other sites is better than average, although it still leaves me wanting more (f/j). You can create widgets (screenshot below), by way of flash slideshows of your lists or javascript “badges”. You can get RSS updates of recent activity, but not a straight XML export of the lists themselves. Integration with Facebook would be a definite plus.
The last feature I want to touch on is the ability to pull current prices for each item (h). While it wouldn’t grab the lowest prices for every item with one click (something that would be awesome, but that I’d imagine may put too much of a strain on the server), it did allow a query through shopping.com (screenshot below) of each item on an individual basis. Very cool.
Downsides
- Community / shopping aspect clutters interface a bit
- Multiple ads per page are also distracting… too focused on selling products.
- Printable version of wishlist is too large (no compact view, must print with images) (e)
- No true raw export of lists (j)
- I didn’t see a gift calendar (g), but I’m assuming that since you put your birthday in, it’ll remind you of friend’s birthdays. Still, a custom calendar would be nice.
Conclusion
Since Kaboodle has just about everything I wanted, save a few interface items, I’ve decided to use it as the base model, to which I will compare the rest of the wishlist sites. I know that is saying something in itself, but hey, Kaboodle deserves it. A-
