How to configure the wishlist in Magento

A shopper is waiting at an airport gate when she finds the jacket she has wanted for months. The price is a little high, her flight boards in ten minutes, and she is not going to type a card number on a phone while holding a boarding pass. She taps a small heart on the product page and puts the phone away. Three weeks later the jacket goes on sale, and she buys it. The question for the retailer is whether that sale belonged to the store that gave her a place to keep the product, or to whichever competitor happened to appear in her search results when she finally came back. For a growing number of retailers the answer depends on a feature that costs almost nothing to turn on.

E-commerce platforms offer the functionality to store lists of products that interest users. This helps improve the customer experience by allowing them to save items for later purchase if they cannot buy right now, and then quickly find them when they return to the store.

The short answer

A wishlist lets shoppers save products they like and return to them later, and in Magento, now Adobe Commerce, it is enabled and configured from the admin panel under Customers in the store configuration. Setting it up takes minutes. The value comes afterwards, from using the saved lists to understand demand, personalize offers and remind customers at the right moment.

What this means for the C-level

Magento is a popular e-commerce platform that allows store owners to offer many features and tools to enhance the customer shopping experience. One of the most crucial features that Magento offers is the wishlist functionality.

The business logic is easy to see in the data on how people shop. The Baymard Institute, in its compilation of cart abandonment studies, reports that 42 percent of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were just browsing or not ready to buy (Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics). Those shoppers are not lost customers, they are customers at an earlier stage of the decision. Without a wishlist, their interest disappears when they close the tab. With a wishlist, their interest becomes an asset with a name on it, a product, a moment and an account. That asset can be used to bring the customer back, to learn which products attract attention, and to prioritize stock and promotions.

For leadership, the decisions are not about the configuration screen but about what the company does with the information. Who in the business reviews the most saved products each month? Do marketing and merchandising have permission to send reminders, and under which consent rules? Does the customer service team know that a list can be shared, and what that means for privacy? A wishlist without a follow-up process is a convenience for the shopper, but a wishlist connected to an owner and a routine is a sales channel.

Setup in Magento

To set up a wishlist in Magento, follow these steps. First, access the Magento admin panel.

Second, in the main menu, select Stores and then Configuration. Adobe's documentation gives the full path as Stores, Settings, Configuration (Adobe Commerce documentation, Customers, Wish List).

Third, in the left sidebar, select Customers and then the wishlist section, which Adobe names Wish List.

Fourth, here you can configure several options, such as the maximum limit of products in the wishlist, the lifetime of the wishlist, and the email notification settings. According to Adobe's reference, the General Options include enabling the module, showing wish lists in the sidebar and, in Adobe Commerce, enabling multiple wish lists with a maximum number per customer. The Share Options include the email sender, the email template, the maximum number of emails per batch, which defaults to 10, and the email text length limit, which defaults to 255 characters. A further option decides whether the customer account shows the number of items or the item quantities (Adobe Commerce documentation, Customers, Wish List). The reference does not list a lifetime setting or a limit on products per list, so confirm in your own version whether those controls exist before promising them internally.

If you want to allow customers to share their wishlists with others, you can enable the Share Wishlist option and configure the list's privacy. On the storefront, Adobe explains that each list can be public or private, that public lists can be seen by others and private lists do not appear in wish list search, and that sharing works by entering recipient email addresses and a message, with the email sent from the store's primary contact (Adobe Commerce documentation, Wish lists on the storefront). Once you have finished configuring the wishlist options, save the changes by clicking the Save Configuration button in the upper right corner of the page, which Adobe's screens label Save Config.

Once you have set up the wishlist in Magento, customers can add products to their wishlist by clicking the Add to Wishlist button on the product page. They can then access their wishlist from their customer account on the online store. A point worth remembering when comparing editions is that multiple lists per account are available only in Adobe Commerce, while Magento Open Source supports one list per account, and that shoppers can add all items to the cart at once or one by one after setting a quantity.

Read also Magento B2B and its importance in businesses, where saved lists play a different role, closer to a recurring purchase list than to a personal wish.

Why wishlists matter for customers

Wishlists in Magento are essential because they provide customers with a more personalized shopping experience and increase the likelihood of them returning to the online store in the future. These lists allow customers to save items they are interested in and want to buy in the future, giving them more time to make a purchase decision and helping them avoid having to search for products again on the website. The experience is similar to keeping a shortlist in a physical store, where the assistant remembers what you looked at and holds it for you.

Why wishlists matter for the business

Additionally, wishlists are also helpful for online store owners. They can use this feature to analyze their customers' preferences and offer special promotions or discounts on popular products. They can also send email reminders to encourage customers to complete their purchases or to notify them of discounts on products on their wishlist. Adobe Commerce handles the sharing emails described above, while reminders and price-drop alerts normally require a marketing automation or email tool connected to the store, so plan that integration as part of the project and not as an afterthought.

Three uses stand out. The first is demand intelligence. Products that are saved often but rarely purchased point to a barrier, which may be price, size availability, delivery time or insufficient information on the product page. The second is targeted communication. A customer who saved a product and later sees it discounted is far more receptive than one who receives a generic campaign. The third is planning. The volume of saves for a new line before launch is an early indicator of demand that merchandising and supply teams can use when deciding how much stock to commit.

In summary, wishlists are a valuable tool for online store owners and customers as they help improve the shopping experience and encourage customer loyalty. For a deeper look at how data and the platform interact, see How to create a simple web API, which explains how wishlist data can be exposed to other systems.

Good practices when launching a wishlist

A wishlist is only useful if shoppers notice it and trust it. Place the Add to Wishlist button where the decision happens, on the product page and in category listings, and keep the label clear. Make the list easy to find in the account area and, if the store allows it, in the sidebar. Test the share email on mobile devices, since that is where most recipients will open it. Check that the sender name is one customers recognize and that the text respects the length limit configured.

On the governance side, define the consent rules for reminders before the first campaign, in line with the regulations of the countries where you sell. Decide how long saved items should remain visible if a product is discontinued, and what the customer sees when a saved item is out of stock. Finally, measure the feature with a few simple indicators, the percentage of visitors who use the wishlist, the conversion rate of saved products compared with the rest, and the time between saving and buying. These numbers tell you whether the feature is a convenience or a channel.

How different industries use saved lists

The same feature plays a different role depending on the business. In fashion and footwear, a wishlist is a fitting room that stays open. Shoppers save items while they wait for their size, for a payday or for a seasonal sale, and the retailer learns which styles and sizes generate interest. In consumer electronics, where purchases are expensive and researched, the list works as a comparison shelf. Customers save two or three models and return after reading reviews, so the pages of those models should be ready to convince them when they do.

In home and furniture retail, lists are used to plan a room or a move. Several members of a household may look at the same list, which makes the sharing function particularly relevant, and the purchase may be spread over weeks or months. In gifts and special occasions, lists can serve the people who are going to buy, since a customer who knows what a friend wants can complete the purchase with confidence. In business-to-business commerce, a saved list looks more like a requisition template, a set of items that a buyer orders repeatedly or reviews before sending to an approver. Recognizing which of these roles applies to your customers helps you decide how prominent the feature should be and what follow-up it deserves.

Privacy, trust and consent

A wishlist stores a record of personal interest, and shoppers expect it to be treated with care. Three points deserve attention. The first is visibility. Because Adobe Commerce lets each list be public or private, the default behavior and the wording presented to the customer should make it clear who can see what. A list that someone expected to be private but appears in search would damage trust quickly. The second is communication. Reminders based on saved items are useful when the customer has agreed to receive them, and annoying or unlawful when they have not, so connect the feature to your consent management. The third is data handling. Saved lists belong to the customer account, so they must be included in the processes for access, correction and deletion requests under the data protection rules that apply to your markets.

None of this makes the feature risky. It simply means that the people responsible for legal and data protection should know the feature exists, review the default settings and approve the communication that depends on it. When that happens before launch, the wishlist becomes one more proof that the company respects its customers.

What a wishlist is not

It helps to be clear about the limits of the feature. A wishlist is not an abandoned cart recovery tool, because the customer has not started a purchase, and it should not be treated as a guarantee of future sales. It is not a substitute for good product pages, since a shopper who saves a product with poor photographs or missing information may never return. It is not a promotion engine by itself either, because discounts on saved items must be designed with the same margin discipline as any other price action. Used with those limits in mind, the wishlist remains what it should be, a low cost way to keep a conversation with the customer alive until the moment is right.

Reviewing the results after ninety days

Give the feature a full quarter before judging it, and review it with a fixed set of questions. How many active customers saved at least one product, and is that share growing? Of the products that were saved, how many were bought within thirty days, and how does that conversion compare with products viewed but not saved? Which products appear repeatedly at the top of the saved list without ever selling, and what do their pages have in common? Did the reminder pilot produce purchases, and did it generate unsubscribes or complaints that offset the gains?

The answers lead to concrete actions. Products with high saves and low sales may need a price review, better content or a stock decision. Segments that use the list intensively may deserve a dedicated campaign. If the usage is low, the problem is probably visibility, and moving the button, changing its label or mentioning the list in the welcome email can change the picture. Documenting these findings in a short quarterly note keeps the wishlist from becoming a forgotten setting and turns it into an input for merchandising, marketing and customer experience decisions.

Monday morning, what to do first

If your store already has the wishlist enabled, ask your team on Monday for three figures from the last quarter, how many customers used it, which ten products were saved most, and how many of those saved items were eventually bought. If the feature is off, ask what the reason was, since sometimes it was simply never configured. Either way, the conversation will show whether anyone owns the topic.

During the week, enable and configure the wishlist on a test environment, check the sharing email, and agree with marketing on one simple automated reminder to pilot, for example a notice when a saved product drops in price. Define who will review the saved product report each month. By Friday you should have the feature live for a controlled audience or a plan with a date, a named owner and the first indicators to follow.

How ICX helps

ICX helps retailers turn platform features into commercial results. Our consultants configure and extend Adobe Commerce, connect it with marketing automation and analytics, and design the customer journey so that features like the wishlist support a clear objective. If you want to map where customers hesitate and how saved lists could bring them back, the ICX Customer Journey toolkit is a practical starting point. To discuss your store, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.

Frequently asked questions

Where do I configure the wishlist in Magento?

In the admin panel, under Stores, Settings, Configuration, in the Customers section, in the Wish List options. Remember to save the configuration afterwards.

Can customers have more than one wishlist?

In Adobe Commerce, yes, when multiple wish lists are enabled and a maximum number is set. Magento Open Source supports one list per account.

Can customers share their wishlist?

Yes. They send it by email to the recipients they choose, and each list can be public or private. The store configures the sender, the template and the limits for these emails.

Does the wishlist send reminders automatically?

Not on its own. Reminders and price alerts usually need a marketing automation or email tool connected to the store.

How can I use wishlist data?

To spot the products customers want but do not buy, to target promotions to people who saved an item, and to anticipate demand before a launch.

Can ICX help configure and use the wishlist?

Yes. We configure the feature, connect it with your marketing tools and design the measurement that shows its impact on sales.

The shopper at the airport gate did not need a discount to come back, she needed a place where her intention was waiting for her, and the retailers that understand that a saved product is a conversation that has only paused are the ones who will be there when it resumes.