Pixiq

In a typical month, you will find about 15,000 unique visitors passing through the doors of my online store. The average stay is about 2 and 1/2 minutes. And you think sometimes, that if this were a physical store, with 15,000 visitors strolling through it in a month, you would be a wealthy individual. Even if one percent of these potential customers bought one print, that would be 150 prints sold.

Possibly if you were selling toasters at a cut-rate price you could do that sort of business, but the art world is a horse of a different color.

For one thing, in order to get to your online store, the potential customer didn't need to hop into a cab, get dressed, or even be more than slightly awake.

There is no sense of urgency, unless you have a sale which "ends soon." As they all do.

Now - even the people that do decide to buy something almost never do it immediately. (The one exception to this are art buyers and interior decorators) who are often in a rush to get prints to a client.

But even if you forget about the difficulty of selling prints on the web, the average customer that does buy a product on the web almost never does it on the first visit. There are statistics about this which show that the average consumer returns at least three times to a site before they finally pull the trigger.

And this leads up to why major online retailers all have some sort of "wishlist" where potential customers can get one step closer to a purchase by keeping a personal list of what they're interested in.

You would think that since so many online stores are built on Wordpress that there would be a fierce competition for a good Wishlist Plugin.

There isn't. If you search for Wishlist Plugins for Wordpress you'll find that most of them are really for social networking. But I did find one, called Favorite Posts, which works well.

The plugin is called, WP Favorite Posts:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-favorite-posts/

Wordpress Favorite Posts allows users to easily create a list of, yes, their favorite posts (in this case photographs) by clicking an Add To Favorites link.

Permalinks to your Favorited Posts show up on a Wordpress page where they can be clicked on to bring you to the favorite post. The list also allows you to remove items from the list.

The favorite list supports two types of persistence: If you are logged in to Wordpress, then the list will be there for you on any computer where you are logged in.

If you aren't logged in, the plugin will set a cookie on the computer you are using, and the list will persist on that computer. (And no, I haven't tried it on an iPad or anything other than my own mac.)

The plugin can be setup in a few minutes. You will need to put a line of PHP code in where you want the Add To Favorites link to show up. This is pretty much par for the course and is in the usual form of: if the favorite function exists than call it. You would put this into your single.php file.

I find the plugin handy when a potential buyer asks me to put together a list of photographs on a certain subject.

There are three features that this plugin should have:

1) Rather than just showing a link to the favorited post, it should also have an option to show either a thumbnail or a medium sized image. If I have the time, I would take a crack at adding that functionality.

2) People would really love it if you could throw some Web 2.0 at it and be able to move and re-arrange the images on the page. That's a little bit harder, but I've always thought that potential customers would like to be able to move pictures around to see what goes with what.

3) There should be a way to email your wishlist. Right now, I'm not exactly sure how to do that.

But if you are looking for a personal Wordpress wishlist for a potential customers, and a way for them to return to their deliberations, this is a pretty good way to go.

At the time of this writing, you can see it in action, in my store: www.BeckermanPhoto.com and also in this photoblog.

I noticed one bug so far, but haven't had a chance to contact the developer about it or try to figure out what the problem is. The plugin is supposed to collect and display (as an option) aggregate stats showing of wishlists. There are lots of possible reasons for this bug. If I figure it out, I'll add the solution to this post.

I haven't found a better way of offering a Wordpress wishlist which just about every major online store has - and now you can have one as well.

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