Your wishlist is scattered across every store, so you track it in a spreadsheet
The wishlist you want lives across a dozen stores, so people end up tracking it in a spreadsheet by hand. That workaround is the proof the gap is real.
Your wishlist is scattered across every store, so you track it in a spreadsheet
The things you want to buy do not live in one place. They live in a brand site, a marketplace, two boutiques, an Instagram tab, and a screenshot folder. No single list holds them, so the most organized shoppers do the only thing that works: they build a spreadsheet by hand. A column for the item, a column for the link, a column for the price, and a running sum at the bottom.
That spreadsheet is not a quirky habit. It is the clearest evidence that the tool you actually want does not exist yet. On r/femalefashionadvice, a top answer to the recurring "how do you keep track of things you want to buy" question is exactly this: a "do want" tab with item, link, price, and a total, maintained by hand. People reach for spreadsheets when the dedicated apps have left a gap, and here the gap is wide.
Most wishlist apps do not fill it, because most wishlist apps are built for gifting and registries, not for the private work of deciding what to buy for yourself.
What a personal want-to-buy list actually needs
A wedding or baby registry is built to be shared with other people who will buy the items for you. A personal want-to-buy list is the opposite: it is private, it spans every store you browse, and it exists so you can compare and decide later, not so someone else can check items off. Those are different jobs, and the spreadsheet exists because the second job rarely gets a real tool.
<div data-viz="symptom-list"> <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"><head><meta charset="utf-8"><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Playfair+Display:wght@400;500&family=Inter:wght@400;500;600&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"><style>:root{--accent:#0c1e3a;--coral:#F26849;--soft:#f7f5f0;--rule:#e2e2e2}*{box-sizing:border-box}body{font-family:Charter,Cambria,Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;max-width:760px;margin:0 auto;padding:8px 24px 24px;color:#1a1a1a;line-height:1.65;background:#fff;font-size:17px}.symptom-list{background:var(--soft);border-left:4px solid var(--accent);padding:16px 22px;margin:18px 0;border-radius:4px}.symptom-list h4{margin:0 0 10px;color:var(--accent);font-size:1em;font-family:Charter,Georgia,serif}.symptom-list ul{margin:0;padding-left:20px}.symptom-list li{margin:6px 0;font-size:0.96em}</style></head><body><article><div class="symptom-list"><h4>What a personal want-to-buy list actually requires</h4><ul><li>It holds items from any store, not just one retailer's catalog.</li><li>It keeps the link, the picture, and the price together, not scattered.</li><li>It is private and built for you to decide, not for others to gift.</li><li>It lets you find a saved item later by describing it, not by scrolling.</li><li>It does not ask you to file, tag, or sort every item as you save it.</li></ul></div></article></body></html> </div>Look at that list against what a spreadsheet gives you. The spreadsheet covers the first three lines well, which is why people build them. It fails the last two: you still have to find the right row by scrolling and reading, and you have to maintain every cell by hand. That is the part that breaks down, and it is why most spreadsheets quietly stop getting updated after a few weeks.
Why the spreadsheet eventually stops getting updated
A hand-built spreadsheet works right up until the moment you are away from your laptop, which is most of the time you are actually shopping. You see something on your phone, you mean to add it later, and later never comes. The friction of opening the sheet, finding the right tab, and pasting the link is small, but it is enough to lose the item, and the item is lost the same way it was lost before you had a spreadsheet at all.
The deeper issue is retrieval. Even a complete spreadsheet makes you do the finding. You scroll the rows, you re-read the names you typed, you try to remember what "black boots v2" meant. The list grew to solve forgetting, but it still leans on your memory to get anything back out of it.
What you want instead is a memory you don't have to maintain: save any product from any store in one motion, no folders and no tags, then get brought back to it by asking. That is the model behind dEssence. You save from your browser, from Telegram, or on the web, and later you ask in your own words, "the wool coat I saved" or "those two lamps," and it assembles a board of the matching saved items so you can compare them side by side. The sum at the bottom of a spreadsheet becomes a question you can just ask out loud.
It is worth being honest about the trade. dEssence is not a price tracker, so it will not watch a price or alert you to a sale, and a spreadsheet column of prices is a snapshot, not a live feed, in either tool. dEssence is also in beta, with no native iOS or Android app yet and a small archive cap on the free plan. What it removes is the manual upkeep and the scroll-to-find: the two places where the spreadsheet, and most wishlist apps, fall down for personal shopping.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why do people track purchases in a spreadsheet instead of a wishlist app?
Because most wishlist apps are built for gifting and registries, which are shared and event-based, not for the private work of deciding what to buy yourself across many stores. A spreadsheet is the manual workaround for a tool that mostly does not exist.
Q: Can one app really hold items from different stores?
Yes, if it saves from anywhere rather than from a single retailer's catalog. dEssence lets you save any product from any site through your browser, Telegram, or the web, then brings the saved items back when you ask for them.
Q: Will dEssence keep my prices updated like a spreadsheet column?
No. dEssence is not a price tracker and does not refresh prices or send sale alerts. It holds what you saved and surfaces it when you ask, so the deciding gets easier even though the price checking is still yours to do.
dEssence is free during beta with no card. Save it, forget it, ask for it later, and let one place hold the wishlist that is currently spread across a dozen stores and one tired spreadsheet.