Wishlists, Registries and Forms
The three things customers create on your shop, and what to do with what they tell you.
Three features that let customers keep or send you something, all switched on and off under Settings, Store Features.
Wishlists
A signed-in customer can save products for later. You see their lists on the customer record.
What that is worth to you is not the list itself but the aggregate: products saved often and bought rarely are usually a price problem or a delivery cost problem, and products saved and then bought in bulk later are candidates for a reminder.
A wishlist on a shop with few customers is a feature nobody uses taking up space on every product page. Switch it off until you have the traffic.
Gift Registries
A customer creates a registry for a wedding, a birth or a birthday, shares the link, and other people buy from it.
Items bought are marked so two people do not buy the same thing. That is the whole point, and it is why a registry is worth more to the customer than a wishlist.
Registries bring new customers who would not otherwise have found you, which makes them one of the few features that pay for themselves on a small shop.
Forms
Settings, Appearance, Forms builds a form you can place on a page: contact, trade application, stock enquiry, event booking.
Submissions arrive under Customers, Form Submissions and can email you when one comes in.
A form beats an email address on a page
An address printed on a page gets scraped and filled with rubbish. A form does not, and it also asks the questions you need answered, so a trade application arrives with the company name and the VAT number rather than as a sentence asking what you need to know.
What to Do With Submissions
Decide who reads them before you publish the form. A contact form nobody checks is worse than no contact form, because the customer believes they have been in touch.
Set the notification so one lands in an inbox a person reads, rather than relying on somebody opening the admin.
Trade Applications
A form is the usual way to handle wholesale signups. The application arrives, you check it, and you add the customer to the trade group by hand.
That last step does not happen automatically. A shop that publishes a trade form and never checks submissions has a queue of applicants who think they have been ignored, which is covered in Customer Groups and Wholesale.