December 15, 2005

Curious George: Amazon wish lists. I filled parts of someone's Amazon's wish list someplace else. There appears to be no way to mark the item as purchased. Is that correct? Or am I missing an option on Amazon's cluttered pages?
posted by rolypolyman 18 years ago
  • AFAIK, you can't. Apparently if you want to get the benefit of not accidentally duplicating purchases, you have to buy through amazon or one of its affiliates. I have this same problem, so I'm going to wait til the last minute, check the wishlist, and if its still listed as unpurchased then I'm going to run to the local brick and mortar and buy the item.
  • Thanks... I guess that's a good reason then to use a third-party gift registry site.
  • For what it's worth - last year I got three copies of the same exact book for Christmas (what made it stranger was that I had probably 20-30 books on my wishlist) - and two of them were bought directly through amazon. So apparently you can't count on the amazon wishlist to work even when the items are bought from them.
  • Unless it really has to be a surprise, you might as well tell the recipient you've bought it, so that they can take it off the list. After all, if you bought it through Amazon, the giftee would be able to tell that someone had got it for them, anyway. (Though I suppose they might not look.) Use of a wish-list sort of blunts the edge of the surprise in any case.
  • I never look.
  • Metafilter: blunts the edge of surprise
  • doh! Just ban me now.
  • INFIDEL.
  • *commits sepuku*
  • Ironish, nicht?
  • *Ironisch Sorry.
  • INFIDEL.
  • The person who is using the wish list has to be paying attention to see that the number desired isn't already the number received. Amazon has no pop-up that warns you "hey dumbass, she already has that book". I ran into this when something was listed as purchased off my list, but wasn't. So I upped the "desired" to 2, and then it went out of print.