Things To Get Me review: the best Amazon wishlist alternative?

David Artiss

Jul 3

Amazon recently retired its browser add-on, which means that adding products to your wishlist from any site other than Amazon has become a thing of the past. At the time I reviewed a number of alternative products, with Things To Get Me being one my favourites. So why should you change to this site and is it really worth moving your wishlist from Amazon?

Why move from Amazon?

An independent site, not tied to a particular retailer, will give you the ability to add products from any site. Even when Amazon could do this, it was a clunky process for anything not listed on Amazon.

Things To Get Me (TTGM) makes the switching process easy as it has an import feature, allowing you to put in a URL of an Amazon wishlist (and others) to automatically add all of the items to your TTGM list.

Things To Get Me features

Things to Get Me, like most wishlist sites, allows you to quickly add products from another site onto a wishlist that you can then share with friends and family. It has an iOS and Android app, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari – most alternatives lack the latter, so this is great news for Mac owners.

You create a free account on the site and then set up as many lists as you like. Each can be given a name, a description, a date (useful for an event such as a birthday) and even a photo or video, to really personalise it. You can also choose a theme for each list from a selection of pre-made options, which changes the background and colour scheme.

You can add items to the list from the website or one of the aforementioned apps or browser add-ons. Details include a description, product image, URL, price, priority and quantity. Only the description and URL is automatically pulled in from a product page – the rest must be entered manually. Images will be extracted, but you need to click on a link first.

Other features include:

Products can be given categories within a list, and each product will then be grouped by its respective category
Instead of creating a wishlist, you can create a money fund where people can chip-in money towards something that you're saving up for
"Teamwork" allows you to invite other people to work on a shared list together
You can allow people to send items to you anonymously. To do this, TTGM arranges for any products to be sent to you via a third party, at an additional cost to the purchaser

One thing I'd love to see is a method of automatically tracking, updating and flagging price changes. At the moment TTGM doesn't even extract price from the source site. This would be like a wishlist combined with sites such as CamelCamelCamel.

Things To Get Me: how it works

I've been using the site for a couple of months now and Rob, the developer of the site, has been very responsive to the support emails I've sent him, both in reporting bugs and suggesting enhancements. The import process has been improved, and a Safari extension added (something I requested in my earlier round-up of Amazon wishlist alternatives).

The whole process of adding to and managing your list is slick, although the fact that the site can't automatically get the price nor automatically load images is a minor pain. Here's what the "Add an item" process look like with the browser add-on:

What I like is the ability to add categories to a list but, sadly, you can't assign multiple categories to the same item or change the sequence of the categories (they appear alphabetically).

So, once you share your list this is how it works:

Purchasers can click on a Reserve link next to a product. This lets others know that you're getting them item, although there is nothing to stop anyone from ignoring this and buying it anyway.
At no point do products disappear from the list, for any visitors, or even the owner.
The list owner just gets to see their list as usual, with no idea of what's been reserved and what hasn't. However, there is an option in the list settings to hide reserved items, but this only hides a reserved items from other visitors.
The list owner can remove items that they've received either manually or by using a tab named Reveal, which will show all products that have been reserved and by whom – you can then remove these from your list.

It's slick and avoids a lot of the issues I had with Amazon, where people didn't correctly mark off buying a product and you ended up with two lots of everything. Since my family started using this website, there have been no such instances.

But there has to be downsides, right? For me, it's the interface which can be a clunky to navigate, with things not as obvious as you'd like. It gets easier with use, but I wonder how many people give up quickly.

For example, here's a pop-up that appears when using the browser add-on. I'm wanting to add a new product and it's showing the wrong list. How would you think I change it?

See that icon in the top right of an outline of a person in a circle? Yes, click on that. I only discovered this by trial and error.

Things To Get Me: how it makes money

You can't run a site like this without making money from it. The company does this by adding affiliate links to some of the products on your list. You won't notice the difference, but when people buy items from your wishlists Things To Get Me will get a percentage of the sale, at no additional cost to the purchaser.

You can make money too. Things To Get Me wants more users so it runs a referral scheme, paying £20 for 10 referrals, £50 for 20 and £100 for 30. To qualify, your personalised link must be used by someone to create a list, with that list having at least five items on it and be shared with at least five people. (Note: the links to Things To Get Me on this page are referral links that may generate the writer some revenue.)

The referral pages open in a new tab and are quite slow.

Interview with Rob, owner of Things To Get Me

Who are you and where are you based?

I'm Rob, the architect and developer behind Things To Get Me. I live just south of Manchester in the UK, with my wife and two young children. When not programming I can usually be found training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or playing the Blues on guitar.

Who else is behind Things To Get Me?

The platform is built and maintained by my wife Raimonda (the ideas factory and "CEO") and myself, but we also have a team of writers who share their stories and experiences of life, whether that's related to gifting or not – we're suckers for a good read. We also recently hired a dedicated tester to catch all the bugs we miss as we continue to add new features.

What's the history of Things To Get Me?

We started the website in 2017 just after the birth of our daughter Grace. With Christmas looming around the corner we decided to finally solve the problem of mass emailing gift ideas between family members, something that always turns into email Armageddon as everyone hits "reply-to-all".

What's next for Things To Get Me?

This year should see the release of our next big feature, the "Inspiration Engine". For everyone who wants a wishlist but struggles to get started, or for those who want some ideas of what to buy for someone else. This will be ground breaking.

You can learn more about Rob and Raimonda on their site.