Ask "does Shopify have a wishlist feature?" and the accurate answer is: no — and Shopify's own documentation treats it as something an app builds rather than something the platform ships.

This isn't an immaturity problem. Shopify's developer docs list wishlists as a use case for full-page customer account extensions, alongside custom return request pages, loyalty dashboards, and subscription management. Shopify even publishes a tutorial, Build new pages in customer accounts, whose worked example is a wishlist page. Instead of shipping the feature, the platform ships instructions for apps to build it.

What makes the question confusing is that customers can save products with a heart icon, just not on your storefront. They do it in the Shop app. And Shopify's help center is blunt about what that means for you:

You can't access information about the products that a customer saves, or customize the notifications that customers receive.

So the feature exists, on the customer's side, invisible to you.

Below: exactly what Shopify does natively, the one workaround that functions without an app, why the DIY approach fails at the storage layer, and seven real wishlist apps compared on the axes that actually differ. Research date: September 1, 2026. All prices are USD as listed on the Shopify App Store.

The short version

If you want customers to save products and then act on it — price-drop emails, back-in-stock alerts, demand data for purchasing decisions — you need an app. This is technically determined, not a preference. The reasoning is below.

If you only need the customer-facing experience and don't plan to use the data, the Shop app's favorites already do this. You just won't see any of it.

If you don't need customer-facing UI at all and only want intent data, skip the app. Customer segments support storefront.product_viewed, which lets you build a segment of everyone who looked at a given product and email them. No app required.

If you are installing something, by scenario:

• Zero budget, testing demand → Wishlist by Square (free, Built for Shopify, no customer data access)
• Alerts on a small budget → SE Wishlist Engine ($14.99/mo unlocks price-drop and back-in-stock)
• Predictable cost as volume grows → Swish (Wishlist King) ($19–$99/mo tied to your Shopify plan, unlimited saved items)
• In-store POS staff need to see customer lists → Swym Wishlist Plus ($29.99/mo and up)
• Adding loyalty and reviews at the same time → Growave — but read the $199 footnote below first

What Shopify actually does natively

New customer accounts don't add it

A common assumption is that migrating to new customer accounts unlocks a wishlist. It doesn't.

The native feature set documented by Shopify is: order history, order status, profile editing, address management, self-serve returns, reordering, and passwordless sign-in. Sign-in sessions persist up to 365 days. No wishlist.

The customer account UI extensions target reference on shopify.dev explicitly cites wishlists as a full-page target use case — meaning it's something an app adds, not something you enable.

The Shop app blind spot

In the Shop app, customers can save unlimited products, build collections (private or public), co-edit them via invite links, and opt into their own price-drop, back-in-stock, and store-update notifications. It's a genuinely capable feature.

But Shop channel analytics gives merchants exactly five metrics: Shop orders, Shop sales, referral orders, referral sales, and Shop product impressions. Not saves. Not savers. Not which products get hearted.

That makes the Shop app a real customer experience and a non-existent merchandising tool. You cannot email a customer about a product they saved there, and you cannot use save counts to inform reorders.

The one native workaround that works

Customer segments support storefront.product_viewed and storefront.collection_viewed, filterable by product ID, tag, date, and view count. You can build a segment of everyone who viewed a specific product in the last 30 days and send them a campaign — with no app installed.

The limits are real: it's viewed, not saved; there's no customer-facing UI whatsoever; and the underlying data is retained for the trailing 26 months. But if your actual goal is "email people who were interested in this product when it comes back in stock," this covers it.

Shopify Forms, for the record, does not. It captures leads. There is no per-product save, no way for a customer to review their own saved list, and no way to un-save.

Why the DIY build fails

"Just customize the theme and store it in a metafield" is a reasonable instinct that runs into a wall. Here are every write path and whether it needs an app:

Path	Can write to customer metafields	App required
Liquid theme	No — docs state plainly: "You can't create metafields in Liquid."	—
Storefront API	No — access.storefront accepts only none or public_read. There is no write setting.	—
Customer Account API	Yes	Yes (customer_write_customers scope plus protected customer data approval)
Admin API	Yes	Yes
Shopify admin	Yes, manually	No, but customers can't self-serve

There is no configuration in which a customer clicks "save" on your storefront and that save lands in Shopify's database without an app — public or custom — in the loop.

The localStorage fallback survives, with three costs. It doesn't sync across devices. It dies on a cache clear. And Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention deletes all script-writable storage — LocalStorage, SessionStorage, IndexedDB, service worker registrations — after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on your site (WebKit blog, March 2020).

The deeper problem is that with no server-side record, you can never send a price-drop email, never analyze demand, and never connect saves to Shopify segments or Flow. It's a UI trick, not a feature.

If you do build a custom app, note that a list.product_reference metafield caps at 128 list items — so 128 products per customer.

Seven wishlist apps compared

The wishlist category on the App Store lists 217 apps as of September 1, 2026. These seven were verified on their live listings.

	Swym Wishlist Plus	Swish (Wishlist King)	Wishlist Hero	Wishlist by Square	Growave	SE Wishlist Engine	UR: Smart Product Wishlist
Developer	Swym Corporation (US)	Swish (IE)	Revamp (US)	Square Apps (US)	Growave (US)	Script Engine (IN)	UnReact Inc. (JP)
Built for Shopify	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Free plan	No	No	Yes	Yes (fully free)	Yes	Yes	No
What "free" means	—	—	500 adds/month	No stated cap	200 orders/month	100 items total	—
Paid entry point	$29.99/mo	$19/mo	$4/mo	—	$15/mo	$7.99/mo	$9.99/mo
What drives the bill	Wishlist actions	Your Shopify plan	Adds per month	Nothing	Order count	Flat	Flat
Price-drop / restock alerts	$29.99+	Included	Price-drop and low-stock at $4+; restock not listed	Not listed	Emails at $199+	$14.99+	Not listed
Guest (logged-out) wishlist	Yes	Yes	Yes, on free	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not listed
Customer accounts	Yes	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Yes	Yes
Shopify Flow	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Yes	Not listed
Shopify POS	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Not listed	Not listed
Rating / reviews	4.7 / ~1,350	5.0 / 264	4.7 / 373	5.0 / ~100	4.8 / ~1,170	4.8 / 250	2.3 / 3
1-star share	2%	1%	5%	0%	2%	1%	33% (1 of 3)
2025–26 negative themes	Pricing, usage caps	None	Support silence	None	Bugs, exports, translation	One thin review	One review
Code left after uninstall	Vendor states it cannot clean up	Not reported	Multiple reports	Not reported	Multiple reports	Not reported	Vendor states none

What the table actually tells you

"Has a free plan" is a useless comparison. Free means five different things here. Wishlist Hero gives you 500 adds per month. SE Wishlist Engine gives you 100 saved items total — a test allowance, not a production one. Growave gives you 200 orders per month. Wishlist by Square states no cap at all. Only when you map these to your own volume does the column mean anything.

The billing driver differs more than the price. Swym Wishlist Plus meters wishlist actions. Growave meters orders. Swish scales with your Shopify plan. SE Wishlist Engine and UR are flat. A high-traffic, low-conversion store gets punished by action-based metering and rewarded by order-based metering; a high-AOV store with few sessions sees the reverse. Comparing monthly minimums across these tells you almost nothing.

Alert tiers are where the real money is. If price-drop and back-in-stock emails are the point of installing a wishlist at all — and for most merchants they are — the cheapest route that covers both is SE Wishlist Engine at $14.99/mo. Wishlist Hero is cheaper at $4/mo, but its listing covers price-drop and low-stock reminders and says nothing about back-in-stock. Growave technically includes a wishlist on its free plan, but back-in-stock wishlist emails require the GROWTH tier at $199/mo. That's a 13x jump from its $15 ENTRY tier, and it's the single most expensive assumption in this category.

Uninstall residue is knowable in advance, and worth knowing. Swym Corporation stated in a review reply that it loses access the moment the app is uninstalled and therefore cannot remove its theme code automatically; it documents a removal procedure and support will assist, but you have to ask. Growave and Wishlist Hero both have multiple residue reports — including a December 2025 review describing 20–30 metafields and metaobjects still present three months after uninstalling, which Growave later replied it had fully cleaned up. UnReact is the only vendor here that has publicly stated its app leaves nothing behind, citing its use of theme app extensions. None of the seven publishes a policy on what happens to the saved wishlist data itself after uninstall.

App notes

Swym Wishlist Plus

Live since 2016, the largest review base in the category, and the broadest integration surface: POS, customer accounts, Flow, Klaviyo, Attentive, Tapcart, and more. It's also the only dedicated wishlist app featured in Shopify's own regional app guide for Japan.

The caution is the meter. There is no free plan; Starter is $29.99/mo with a 3,000-action monthly ceiling. A May 2025 review reports that on hitting the Pro tier's 10,000-action cap, the app stopped entirely and disappeared from the storefront, with a $299 enterprise tier offered as the next step. The vendor confirms usage-based billing and says quotas are listed and alerts fire before overage — but if you need a fixed line item, this isn't it.

Swish (Wishlist King)

Formerly Wishlist King, from a developer formerly called Appmate. Search by the old name and you may not find it.

Saved items and sessions are unlimited, and the monthly price tracks your Shopify plan: $19 on Basic, $29 on Shopify, $49 on Advanced, $99 on Plus (with a 100,000 monthly session cap on that tier). Free setup and customization is included on every plan, which several reviews cite specifically. Three 1-star reviews total, zero 2-star, and none of them from 2025 or 2026 — the cleanest record in this set.

Wishlist Hero

At $4/mo it's the cheapest route to price-drop and low-stock reminders plus Klaviyo, GA4, Meta, and TikTok pixels. The free tier covers 500 adds per month including guest wishlists.

The 2025–26 negative reviews cluster almost entirely on support non-response, with a 5% one-star share (17 of 373) — the highest of the five apps here with more than 100 reviews. UR's 33% comes from a single 1-star out of three reviews and isn't a comparable ratio. The vendor has acknowledged that a spam filter was swallowing tickets and says it has been adjusted. Reasonable for a team that configures things itself and doesn't depend on vendor response times.

Wishlist by Square

Fully free with no stated cap, Built for Shopify certified, 16 languages, and it requests no access to customer data at all. Products, theme (view only), metaobjects, and locale data; nothing else — no customer PII, no order history. Wishlist Hero and SE Wishlist Engine don't display a data access section on their listings, so a strict seven-way comparison isn't possible, but of the five that do, this is the narrowest permission set by a wide margin.

The trade-off is scope. Price-drop alerts, restock alerts, sharing, and multiple lists are absent from the listing. And the review base is eight months old: of the 20 most recent reviews, 11 came from merchants who had used it for under 24 hours. A 5.0 rating built on first-day impressions is not the same signal as a 5.0 built over three years. As a zero-cost way to find out whether your customers save products at all, it's hard to beat.

The developer is "Square Apps"; any relationship to the payments company Square could not be confirmed.

Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist

Wishlist, loyalty points, and product reviews in one app, with all three available on a free plan up to 200 orders per month. If you're standing up loyalty and reviews anyway, consolidating is a real argument.

The trap is the alert tier described above: back-in-stock wishlist emails start at $199/mo. It also requests the widest permission set of any listing here that publishes one — order editing, discount editing, store credit, gift cards, script tags, and theme write access — which is consistent with the residue reports.

SE Wishlist Engine

The listed name is "SE Wishlist Engine," not "Wishlist Engine." Price-drop and back-in-stock alerts arrive on the $14.99/mo Advanced tier, which makes it the cheapest path here to a wishlist that covers both — Wishlist Hero undercuts it at $4/mo but doesn't list back-in-stock. Built for Shopify, with 2 one-star reviews and zero two-star out of 250.

English-only admin. The free tier caps at 100 saved items total, and the trial is 5 days rather than the 14–30 that's typical.

UR: Smart Product Wishlist

Shown as "シンプル Wishlist｜お手軽お気に入り" in the Japanese locale — same app, same handle. Built by UnReact Inc. in Fukuoka, and the listing explicitly notes the developer does not offer direct support in English.

Only three reviews, averaging 2.3. A March 2026 one-star report describes a page refresh loop after adding the block to a theme; the vendor replied pointing to a possible app conflict and stated that because the app uses a theme extension, uninstalling leaves no impact on theme code. Feature scope is minimal, and the Japanese listing states a cap of 50 products per customer. Guest wishlists, alerts, and sharing are all absent from the listing.

Before you install

• Do you have a plan to use saved data? If not, the Shop app or a storefront.product_viewed segment is free and sufficient.
• Do you know your monthly save volume or order count? You can't evaluate a free tier without it.
• Are price-drop or restock alerts in scope? If yes, Growave's free tier and Wishlist by Square drop out immediately.
• Do you need guest (logged-out) saves? Several listings are silent on this; UR appears to assume login.
• Might you switch apps later? Then uninstall residue belongs in your selection criteria, not your post-mortem.
• Have you read the app's requested data access? Some ask for order editing and customer PII to power a heart icon.
• Do you have a duplicate theme or dev store to test in before this touches production?

Bottom line

Three decisions, in order.

First, confirm you need an app at all. No merchant-side data use means the Shop app covers it. Intent data only means segments cover it. The DIY server-side build isn't a budget option — it's not an option, because Liquid can't create metafields and the Storefront API has no write path.

Second, alerts split the field. Need both price-drop and back-in-stock, and SE Wishlist Engine at $14.99/mo is the practical floor. Need only price-drop and low-stock, and Wishlist Hero does it at $4/mo. Don't need alerts at all, and Wishlist by Square costs nothing and tells you whether the feature is worth funding.

Third, decide what you're optimizing for at scale. Flat and predictable points to Swish. Deep integrations and POS point to Swym. Consolidating loyalty and reviews points to Growave — with the $199 alert tier written down where your finance team can see it.

Pricing and review counts move. Every figure here reflects the Shopify App Store as of September 1, 2026; re-check the listing before you commit.