User:Andy/Idea/Meta wishlist site

The idea
Someone really should make a website devoted to holding the wishlists of things that people want to buy from other online retailers.

So firstly you would have to convince a couple of big online retailers e.g. Amazon, Thinkgeek to export their current inventory and pricelist as XML or something. Amazon already do this.

Then you'd get users to make their wishlists based on the items they want and not the retailers they would get it from (unless they specifically wanted that, too). When displaying a wishlist item that had no specified retailer then the viewer could choose to see the cheapest items or whatever. The engine could possibly also display items that are similar to the wishlisted items, but not identical, for extra surprise value.

People making wishlists could also ban certain retailers from the list of acceptable sources of any given item.

The entire point of this practice is so that people can make and publish their wishlists at a vendor-neutral place and if they like they can indicate that they would rather not use certain retailers. The problem with vendor-centric wishlists is that it suggests that the wishlist maker wants the item from the retailer that the wishlist is displayed from.

This concept already works for sites that exist only for those wanting the cheapest price on various items, and for that to work these retailers must already have some sort of feed of their current inventory. So why not for wishlists also?

Feel free to contact me with any offers of venture capital.

What I need most now

 * An online book retailer who has some API for accessing their catalog, so they can be pitted against Amazon / Amazon UK.

Comments
I've been working on one at wishlist.org.uk --Dee 11:33, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)