Amazon.com's wishlist feature has been around for a long time. It's a very useful tool, considering most people buy gifts from Amazon anyway.

I've put together some tips for sharing and maintaining your Amazon wishlist.

General wishlist tips:

• Review your list frequently (once a month, or so), since wishes often change. You wouldn't want someone buying you something that no longer pique's your interest. Also, products don't reside on Amazon forever. Make sure to check the status on each item, and remove products that are unavailable, or no longer offered.
• Keep your list active year-round. Many people assume the wishlist is only for Christmas, but it can come in handy any time. Even if you only use it for Christmas, it's amazing how fast December arrives each year, so always maintain your wishlist throughout the year.
• Prioritize your wishlist. Amazon lets you apply a Priority setting to each wishlist item: highest, high, medium, low, lowest. Use these settings. It really helps organize your items.

Sharing your wishlist

Amazon has a few methods to help share your wishlist, since that is the main idea.

• Send an email through the Amazon site.
• Copy/paste your wishlist URL into your own email program.
• Provide a wishlist "badge" for your own web site.
• Embed a portion of your wishlist on your web site.

Customize your wishlist URL

Most of the time, you're gonna pass around your wishlist URL via email. Amazon tries to make each wishlist URL as short as possible, so the link doesn't break in an email message.

If the URL is still too long for your tastes, or you'd like a more customized URL, try any of these ideas:

• Use a service like TinyUrl to make your wishlist URL really short.
• If you maintain your own web site, add a custom redirect to your wishlist. Something like: http://wishlist.mydomain.com/, or http://mydomain.com/go/wishlist.

Include filters in the URL

Note: Your default wishlist URL does not include any optional filters. Visitors tend to buy things from the top to bottom.

When a person views your wishlist, based on the URL provided from Amazon, they will see each item listed in the order it was added. This is probably not the way you want viewers to see your wishlist. Rather, you want them to view items based on priority.

In order to do this, visit your wishlist, and set the Sort By filter to Priority (high to low):

This will generate a new URL in your browser's address bar.

Copy and paste this URL in order to pass it around, or redirect it.

This way, when someone visits your wishlist, your most cherished items are on top.