I’m an analytical shopper. I compare the price and quality before I buy. This pattern applies to shopping in brick and mortar stores and to online shopping.

Our wonderful technology has allowed us to scatter shopping lists across the web

I snap a photo with my phone of things that spark my interest when I’m running errands. I have photos on my phone of plants for the garden, organizing products, and of course, shoes.

I do a lot of searching online for products that I need. I add them to my list on the retailer’s site. Most online retailers will allow you to create a list of things that you are considering buying.

The downside for using this service is you must create an online account with a username and password. Keeping up with log-in information for multiple retailers can be mind-boggling.

A few weeks ago, I searched for a water bottle and added one that I liked to a wishlist the online store has for my convenience. When I was ready to buy the water bottle, I went to the wishlist and discovered that the price had increased.

That aggravated me.

That’s when I decided to use Evernote for my exclusive wishlist manager. It made perfect sense. It would be one place to stash everything that I am considering purchasing.

No more jumping from one online retailer to another.

No more having to sign in to the retail account when I’m “window shopping”.

It might also add a filter to the Artificial Intelligence that is creeping into my life.

Here are some easy ways that I have used to move information into Evernote

I shared the photos of plants, shoes and organizing products stored on my phone with Evernote. Moving forward, I will use the camera feature in Evernote to capture new items.

For catalog shopping, I’ll snap a photo of the item on the page and put it in Evernote. The note will be “untitled”, so I will add some identifying information to the note title.

I use the Evernote web clipper to capture items when I’m on my computer or device. Evernote captures the web link along with the photo and information. Most web clippers allow you to choose a notebook and add tags before you save your note.

• There are web clippers for the various browsers on our Macs, Chromebooks and Windows computers.
• There are web clippers built into the Evernote app on iPhones, Android phones, and tablets.

 

If you are new to Evernote or need a refresher on web clipping, the links below will help you.

Evernote Quick Start

Mobile Web Clipping

 

The beauty of Evernote is in its lack of structure. You can design Evernote to work the way you think. I’m going to share the structure that I use for my Evernote Wishlist.

Use these simple steps to create your wishlist notebook

• Create a notebook in Evernote and name it Wishlist.
  • You could also call it Future Purchases or Stuff to Buy. It’s your Evernote; you name the notebook.
  • I recommend capitalizing notebook names.
• Create a new note for each item that you add to your Evernote Wishlist.
  • • A note is a page in your notebook.
• Visit your various online lists and clip the saved items to Evernote

 

This may be all the structure you need if your notebook has fewer than fifty items.

Evernote search is powerful.

Open your Evernote Wishlist Notebook and do a search for your item or the store when you are ready to buy. All notes within the Wishlist Notebook with the search term will pop up.

This screenshot from my Android phone shows a search for “Rieker”, my favorite brand of shoes. Notice how the search term is highlighted.

• In the desktop application click the link at the top of the note to go to the item on the retailer’s website.
• On a mobile device click the “more information” icon which is a lowercase i with a circle around it. You will see the link to the item. You can also tag your note from here.

How to use Evernote tags

If you have a large wishlist or if you like more structure, then I recommend using Evernote tags.

Evernote Tags work like hash-tags on your social media platforms. When you tag notes and later search for a specific tag, all the notes with that tag will be there. Notes can have more than one tag which in my opinion makes Evernote rock!

This screenshot from my phone illustrates a group of tags that relate to spaces, categories of items, people and stores. The tags are all associated with notes in my Wishlist notebook.

You may be wondering about the dollar symbol. I decided to use the $ symbol in front of all the tags associated with my Wishlist Notebook.  I use contextual tags to create structure in my Evernote account.

Notice too that my tags are all lower case. I capitalize my Notebooks and leave tags in lower case.

Use contextual tags when designing your Evernote structure Click To Tweet.

These are rules that I have created for my Evernote structure. They make sense to me. You should design your Evernote space and workflow to make sense to you.

I have transferred all the items from my various retailer wishlists to Evernote. I went through my photos on my phone and sent images of items that I saved for a future purchase to Evernote.

It is both a relief and exhilarating to have all this information in one Evernote notebook.

If you need help with setting up Evernote, contact me. I am a Certified Evernote Consultant and have trained several of my clients to use Evernote.

Are you are going to create your own Evernote Wishlist notebook? Let me know in the comments.