Christmas gift lists for Shopify stores: how they bring in new shoppers

A Christmas gift list lets your customer choose what they'd like from your store and send that list to the people buying for them. Every person who opens the link lands on your shop, ready to buy a gift, and some of them will never have heard of you before. Your customer does the sharing, in family chats and emails you could never reach with an ad.

We make Listify, a gift registry app that helps Shopify stores run their gift registries and wishlists.

Why a Christmas gift list brings in new shoppers

Most Christmas marketing is you trying to reach people. A gift list turns that round: the people come to you, sent by someone they're buying for.

• The list travels further than your ads. One customer shares one link with parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. Each of them is a visit from someone who wasn't in your audience yesterday.
• Guests arrive knowing what to buy. They aren't browsing. They've been told which product, which size and which colour, and the shortest way to get it is to buy it from you.
• Nobody buys the same thing twice. When a guest buys something from a Listify gift list, the list marks it as bought, so the next guest picks something else. That's the part a screenshot of a basket or a note on the fridge can't do.
• It isn't only one list per family. Children's lists, a list for the couple hosting this year, a Secret Santa list for the office: every one of them is another link pointing at your store.
• You can see what it brought in. Listify's analytics show the orders and revenue that came through lists and how many people visited them, and for each list, where its visitors came from. That's on every plan, including the free one.

Here's what that looks like for one list. Say you sell children's books and toys, and a parent makes a Christmas list for their two children in November. They put eight things on it and send the link to both grandparents, an aunt and two godparents. That's five people on your store who came because of one customer, each of them buying something they know is wanted, and the list keeps them from doubling up. You didn't pay for any of those visits.

There's a quieter benefit too. A guest who found you through a gift list has bought from you once and now knows where you are. Next year, that person might make a list of their own.

Gift list or wishlist?

Listify offers both, and for Christmas the difference matters.

A wishlist is a shopper's saved products, tied to their customer account. It has its own link they can share, and anyone who opens it can buy straight from your store. It doesn't track purchases, though, so two people can buy the same thing.

A gift list (Listify calls it a registry) is built for being bought from. It has an occasion and a date, it marks items as bought, and the list owner can set where gifts should go: a delivery address, or pickup at one of your locations. When a guest checks out from the list, that address is filled in for them. Guests can add a gift note on every plan, and the list owner gets an email when something's bought.

For Christmas, the gift list is usually what you want, because the whole point is other people buying. A list dated 25 December stays open for two weeks after the day, which covers the late presents and the relatives you only see at New Year, and then moves to past lists on its own.

Which stores and customers it suits

A Christmas gift list works best where the person receiving the gift has opinions about it. That covers more stores than you'd think:

• Toys, books and games, where parents make lists for their children and grandparents want to get it right.
• Fashion and accessories, where size and colour matter and a wrong guess turns into a return in January.
• Homeware, kitchen and garden, where couples and new homeowners know exactly which piece they're missing.
• Beauty, hobby and specialist shops, where the shopper knows the brand and the shade and the family doesn't.

The people making lists aren't only children writing to Father Christmas. Teenagers, couples, students living away from home and older relatives who'd rather not receive another scarf all make lists when someone asks them what they want. A gift list is simply the easiest answer to that question, and if your store offers it, the answer is a link to you.

How Listify makes it easy

You don't need a developer, and you don't touch your theme's code.

Setting up. After you install Listify, a setup guide inside the app walks you through it: you choose your colours and button style, turn on the Listify app embed in your theme editor, and add the gift list button to your product pages. The app checks your theme and tells you when each piece is live. Listify lives in Shopify's theme app blocks, so it never touches your theme's Liquid and survives theme updates.

Making Christmas its own occasion. On Starter and above, you can add your own occasions next to the built-in ones, so Christmas sits beside weddings and baby showers. Each occasion gets its own cover images and its own recommended products. Those recommendations are what turn a blank list into a good one: when a customer starts a Christmas list, it can open with a few products you've chosen already on it, and your recommendations are shown first when they add more. You pick the products, so it's also a way to put your Christmas range in front of every list maker.

On the Free plan your store has one list type, and you can rename it. Call it "Christmas gift list" for the season and change it back in January. You won't get Christmas as a separate occasion with its own covers and recommendations, but your customers can make lists and share them, and guests can buy from them.

For guests. Registry attribution rides Shopify's line item properties, which are written when the gift goes in the basket, so the purchase still lands on the list when a guest pays with Shop Pay. Lists, emails and buttons are translated into 18 languages, which helps when the family buying is spread across countries.

In your shop. If you have a physical shop, Listify gives you a QR sign to print, on every plan. A customer scans it with their phone and starts a list there and then.

Getting ready before December

Lists made in early December need time to be shared and bought from, so the sooner your store offers them, the more of the season they catch.

Already running a registry app?

You don't have to start from scratch to change apps, and you don't have to wait until January.

We migrate your registries with you, from an export of your current app, on any plan including Free, at no extra charge. Coming from Gift Reggie, items and purchase history come across, so nobody's progress resets to zero. From any other app, we check whether purchase progress can be rebuilt before we agree a date. We also give you a redirect file so the registry links your customers already shared lead to the right place. You import it, or we do it with you through collaborator access.

The one rule: don't uninstall your current app until the export has been checked and the redirect file is in place. At Christmas, when lists are busy, that matters more than ever, so ask early. The first step is a migration assessment on the migration page, where you can send a sample of a few registries.

If you're moving from a specific app, there's a guide for Gift Reggie and one for Swym. The full process, from export to switch-over, is in the registry migration checklist.