As retailers invest heavily in AI-powered tools to predict what customers will buy next, many continue to overlook one of the clearest signals of consumer intent: the wishlist. While sales data records completed purchases, Ashley Wright, Chief Commercial Officer at VS Labs, argues that wishlists reveal the products shoppers are considering, the trends beginning to emerge and the gap between aspiration and purchase.
Retail is, quite obviously, obsessed with what customers buy. Every ecommerce dashboard is built around transactions, conversion rates and revenue. If a product sells, it is deemed successful. If it doesn’t, retailers move on. Yet this focus on completed purchases leaves a significant blind spot. It tells us what happened, but not what almost happened.
Wishlists become interesting here. Often treated as a simple customer convenience feature, a mere shopping list, they are actually one of the few places where shoppers reveal their intentions without the pressure of making an immediate purchase. When somebody saves a product, they are signalling interest, but they are also revealing hesitation. The product has caught their attention, but something is standing between desire and action.
That distinction matters because purchasing decisions are rarely straightforward. The item that ends up in a basket is often shaped by affordability, timing, competing priorities or discounting. Consumers may want one thing but buy another. They may aspire to a premium product while settling for a cheaper alternative. They may save something for weeks before deciding whether it is worth the spend. Looking only at transactions risks missing that wider story.
Viewed collectively, wishlist data can provide a different lens on consumer behaviour. It can reveal products that generate significant interest, but not immediate revenue. It can highlight emerging trends before they appear in sales reports. They may indicate categories consumers are actively exploring, even if they are not yet prepared to commit. In many ways, wishlists sit between browsing and buying, offering a view of customer intent that sales data alone cannot provide.
This has become increasingly relevant as consumers take longer to make purchasing decisions. Economic uncertainty has encouraged more deliberate spending habits, particularly for higher-value purchases. Shoppers compare prices, research alternatives and often revisit products multiple times before making a decision. The idea of a seamless journey from discovery to checkout remains appealing in theory, but in practice many purchases involve a period of consideration that can last days, weeks or even months.
At the same time, retailers are investing heavily in technologies designed to predict future behaviour. AI-powered recommendation engines analyse previous purchases, browsing patterns and customer profiles to determine what somebody is likely to buy next. These tools can be highly effective, but they remain rooted in historical behaviour. They learn from what customers have already done. Wishlist data offers something subtly different. Rather than predicting intent, it captures intent directly.
The value of that distinction should not be underestimated. A recommendation engine might infer that a customer is interested in a product because of their previous activity. A wishlist tells a retailer that the customer has actively selected it for future consideration. The next step is figuring out what it will take to move the purchase from intent to checkout. Understanding that gap can reveal as much about consumer behaviour as the eventual purchase itself.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of wishlist data is that it reflects aspiration as well as demand. It captures the products consumers hope to own, not simply the products they can afford to buy today. And with that provides insight into sentiment, priorities and emerging preferences. While sales data records decisions that have already been made, wishlist data offers a glimpse into decisions that are still being considered, trends that are emerging, and the kind of person that individual consumer wants to be. Tactics and strategies can be about making this a reality.
For an industry focused on understanding what customers will do next, that makes wishlists a surprisingly underused source of insight. Because while sales data tells us what consumers bought, wishlists reveal what they were thinking. And that may be the more valuable story.
Ashley Wright
