Most wishlist tools make one quiet assumption that breaks everything: that the things you want come from one place. They don't. The candle you spotted in a Covent Garden shop, the notebook brand you found through a newsletter, the specific trainers that only seem to exist on one small brand's own website — none of that fits neatly onto an Amazon wishlist, and that's before you've even considered that plenty of people in the UK actively prefer not to shop on Amazon at all.
The result is a wishlist that only represents a fraction of what you actually want. And the people buying for you end up guessing the rest — or defaulting to gift cards, which is a fine outcome but not exactly personal.
A universal, retailer-agnostic wishlist solves the underlying problem rather than working around it.
Retailer-agnostic means the tool has no stake in where you shop. It doesn't push its own marketplace, doesn't favour items from partner brands, and doesn't require a product to exist in any particular catalogue before you can add it. You add what you want; the app stores it. Where the item comes from is irrelevant.
In practice, this means your list can contain a jumper from John Lewis, a book from Waterstones, a kitchen gadget from Lakeland, a pair of earrings from a small Etsy seller, and a skincare product from Boots — all in one place, all shareable via one link. No copy-pasting across three different wishlists or maintaining a sprawling spreadsheet that gets out of date the moment you share it.
It also means the list doesn't expire when you stop using a particular platform. Your items are yours, not tied to whichever retailer happens to host the wish functionality as a side feature of their shopping experience.
The UK has a genuinely diverse retail landscape. British shoppers spread their purchasing across a wide range of retailers in ways that don't map neatly onto the American internet's assumption that Amazon is the default answer to everything.
John Lewis for homeware and appliances. Boots for health and beauty. ASOS, & Other Stories, or a small independent for clothes. Argos for electronics and toys. Waitrose for food gifts. An independent bookshop for, well, books. These are all legitimate, commonly used, well-loved British retailers — and none of them have a wishlist feature that talks to any of the others.
When the people buying for you are also based in the UK, they want to see prices in pounds. They want links that actually work and ship to a UK address. They want to land on a product page that isn't going to quote them in dollars or refuse their postcode. This sounds basic, but it matters in practice — particularly for products that are available in the UK but only listed on international versions of a site.
The things people actually want come from dozens of shops. A wishlist that only works with one of them isn't really a wishlist — it's just a shopping cart you've forwarded to someone else.
gift it is built around the idea that adding an item to your list should take about ten seconds and should work regardless of where the item comes from. There are three ways to do it, and they cover most real-world situations.
The first method is barcode scanning. If you're in a physical shop and you spot something you like, open the app, scan the barcode, and the item is added — name, price, and a photo pulled automatically where the product can be identified. This is particularly useful for gift lists built while you're actually out shopping, or for capturing something specific (a particular edition, a specific size or colour) rather than a vague category.
The second method is link pasting. Copy the URL of any product page — from any website, UK or otherwise — paste it into gift it, and the app pulls the product details. Price, image, name, and the link back to the page for the gifter. This works for the vast majority of retailer websites without any special setup.
The third method is manual entry. For items you can't find online, things that are out of stock, or gifts that are more of a category than a specific product (“any fiction shortlisted for the Booker this year” is a real example), you can type in a name, description, and approximate price yourself. It's less automated, but it means nothing falls off the list just because it doesn't have a product page.
Once your list has items on it, you share a single link. That's it — one URL that works for everyone, regardless of how many shops your items come from. The person receiving the link sees your list, can browse everything on it, and can click through to any item to buy it directly from the relevant retailer.
If they have a gift it account (free, takes under a minute), they can mark an item as taken care of. Other gifters visiting the list will then see that item is already covered, so they can choose something else without needing to coordinate with anyone directly. It's the quiet coordination layer that makes group gift-buying less chaotic without requiring anyone to send a round of “has anyone bought the X yet?” messages.
Crucially, the person whose list it is can't see any of this activity while it's happening. They don't know who has marked what, or whether anyone has bought anything at all, until after the occasion date you set when you created the list. The surprise stays intact. The gifters stay coordinated. And you end up with things you actually wanted, from shops you actually use.
gift it is built for UK shoppers. Prices on your list display in pounds, and link importing works with UK retail websites. If you add a product from a UK retailer's site, the link your gifters see will take them to the same UK page — not a redirected international version with different pricing or availability.
The core value of a universal wishlist is straightforward: it removes the gap between what you actually want and what the people buying for you know about. That gap exists not because people aren't thoughtful — they are — but because the tools for communicating it have always been limited to wherever you happen to do most of your shopping. gift it removes that limitation. One list, any shop, shared anywhere.
Add items from any shop by scanning a barcode or pasting a link, then share one link with anyone.
Create your list