Amazon Hacks

Organize Your Wish List by Priority

Amazon provides a few ways to sort your wish list, but missed an important one: sorting by which items you want most.

When I sat down to create my Christmas list in November of 2002, I decided to use my Amazon wish list. I added all the books, CDs, and DVDs that I had been craving to my list. Next, I went to the “Your Wish List” page, where I planned to rank the items on my list. To my surprise, I found that Amazon doesn’t allow you to rank your wish list.

Instead, all you can do is sort the list by (a) date added, (b) last updated, or (c) price. Even worse, the default sorting is by date added, and, since the items I wanted the most were the first ones I added, they ended up at the bottom of my list. (Amazon does provide a “Comment” field for each wish list item, so I initially thought I could store my ranks as comments, but Amazon doesn’t let you sort by comment either.)

In search of a solution, I took a look at Amazon Web Services (http://www.amazon.com/webservices) and found that I could build my own simple application that adds ranking ability for Amazon wish lists.

Ranking Your Wish List

Using the Wish List Ranking application is simple. First, fill out the registration form (http://www.yoon.org/amazon/register). The only tricky part is that you have to enter your Wish List ID manually [Hack #18]. The FAQ (http://www.yoon.org/amazon/faq) includes instructions on how to find your Wish List ID. Then, as you can see in Figure 2-8, the application ...