IKEA Has No Real Wishlist App: What to Use Instead

There is a list at IKEA. Favourites sits in the site header, the shopping bag is next to it, and the IKEA app exists. What there is not is an IKEA wishlist app that survives a renovation, because a renovation is never bought in one shop.

What IKEA actually gives you

Worth being accurate here, because the internet is full of claims in both directions.

On the IKEA website there is a Favourites control in the header, alongside the shopping bag. Favourites is where saved products collect while you browse, and the bag is the checkout path. Both are tied to your account and to the country version of the site you are on.

There is also the IKEA app, which IKEA's own apps page describes as a way to get inspiration, see personalised offers, visualise how things look in your space and prepare for a store visit. The same page lists separate IKEA Home smart apps for the smart lighting and blinds products, which are a different thing entirely.

What that page does not do is describe a wishlist feature, so this article will not tell you which buttons the app has. App layouts change by country and by release, and the honest version is: check your own app before planning around a particular control. As a rule, the saving that exists is saving of IKEA products, in the IKEA account, for the IKEA site you are signed into.

Where a store list stops working for a renovation

This is the actual gap, and it has six parts.

It only holds one shop. A kitchen is IKEA cabinets, a worktop from a specialist, a tap from a plumbing merchant, paint from a hardware chain and handles from a marketplace seller. A list that holds a fifth of the project is not the list you consult when you are standing in the aisle.

It does not keep the article number next to the photo. The eight-digit article number is the only thing a staff member can act on, and it is the first thing that disappears when you save a picture instead of a product page.

It does not know which room this is for. Two similar lamps in one list are useless three weeks later, because the one that matters is the one for the hallway, and nothing in the list says which is which.

It does not remember what you paid attention to. The price you saw when you saved it, and whether the price was the reason you saved it, are gone. So is the alternative you were comparing it against.

It is tied to one country's site. Save something on the UK site, open the link on the US site, and you may land on a different product, a different article number or nothing at all. For anyone shopping across borders or moving countries, this happens constantly.

It does not survive a discontinued product. Furniture ranges get retired. The saved entry stops leading anywhere, and unless you wrote down what it was, you cannot even search for a replacement.

What to use instead, by the job

Five real options. Each one works; each one charges you something.

A spreadsheet

Columns for item, shop, article number, room, size, price and link. It is free, it sorts, it totals, and it is genuinely the most capable option on this list for a big project.

What you pay: every row is typed by hand, on a phone, usually while standing up. Photos are awkward to embed and the sheet stops being updated in week three, which is the week the project gets real.

A visual board

Pinterest-style boards are unbeatable for deciding what a room should feel like. The mood comes together fast and it is easy to share with a partner or a builder.

What you pay: boards are about images, not products. Article numbers, sizes and prices are not part of the format, and by the time you are buying, the board tells you a sofa should be that shade of green and nothing else.

Notes

Fast, always to hand, no setup. For a weekend of small purchases it is fine.

What you pay: nothing is searchable a month later, because you wrote "the shelf" and there are four notes containing the word shelf. Links decay into bare URLs and the note becomes an archaeological site.

A shopping list app

Built for items and quantities, often shared with a partner, tickable in the shop. Good for consumables and for the final buying trip.

What you pay: almost no context. Most of these apps have nowhere sensible to put a room, a photo of the alcove, a size or a source link, and they are designed to be emptied rather than kept.

A universal wishlist tool

Tools that save a product from any site, keep the image, the price at save time and a note. This covers the most ground: multiple shops in one list, context attached, price visible.

What you pay: a saved page is a snapshot, not a live feed — if a shop changes its product page or retires the item, no tool can fix that for you. And you still have to decide what to write in the note; nothing invents the room name for you.

What one good row contains

A renovation list works or fails on what is in a single entry. Six fields, and you can write them in about twenty seconds while you save.

Link to the product page, so you can reach the real thing. Article number or SKU, because that is what staff and stock checks use and it survives a broken link. Room, one word: hallway, bathroom, kids. Size, the dimension that matters — the width of the alcove, the drop for the pendant, the depth of the cabinet run. Price when you saved it, so you know later whether something changed. And one line of why: "matches the oak worktop", "only one narrow enough for the gap by the door".

Skip the room and the size and the list looks complete while being unusable. That is the failure mode almost everyone hits: forty saved items, and in the shop you cannot remember which of the two tap models was for the utility sink.

Measurements belong next to the link

Measurements always start in a separate place: a paper scrap, a photo of a notebook page, a note called "sizes". Then buying happens somewhere else, and the two never meet again.

Keep them together. When you save the shelf, put "1480 mm alcove, max depth 300" in the same entry. It is the single highest-return habit in a renovation, because the moment of truth is always the same: you are in the shop, the thing is in front of you, and the only question is whether it fits.

The same goes for paint. The colour name alone is not enough — the finish, the base and the tin size all matter, and they are not guessable from a photo of the wall.

Building it in one evening, without starting a new system

You do not need a methodology. Ninety minutes, once.

Open whatever you already have — the IKEA favourites, the board, the browser tabs, the note with three links in it — and go through it once, room by room rather than shop by shop. For each thing you still actually want, write the six fields above into one place. Anything you no longer want, delete without ceremony; a third of it will go, and that is the point.

Then take a tape measure through the flat and add the numbers to the rows that need them. Fifteen minutes. This is the part people skip and then regret in a car park.

If you want that list to hold things from any shop, dEssence is built for the multi-shop version of this: you save an item from the browser extension, the Telegram bot or the web app with its photo and your note, and if a price matters, you set a watch on that saved item yourself as a separate step. Watching is something you turn on, not something that happens quietly in the background. The free plan is $0 forever, 20 saves a day and 100 watches checked daily; Pro is $10 a month with 150 saves a day, hourly watch checks and saved things organised into boards.

Whatever you use, the test is the same. Stand in a shop, open the list, and see whether it tells you the article number, the room and the size. A store wishlist will tell you what IKEA sells. The list you need tells you what your flat needs.