I got my gift certificate from Amazon today in payment of my affiliate fees.
People bought over $500 of stuff from Wish List Live (aka gift-list) via Amazon this year. That's pretty good considering the beta-ish nature of the list center. This amounted to a $32.02 gift certificate being applied to my account. If I get more people to sign on next year (perhaps through an evil email marketing campaign), I could make even more cash.
I have some things on Wish List Live to review yet, including how to clear gifts from the list. If you go by there using a logon that you have already you'll notice that all of the gifts that were purchased for Christmas are still on the lists. I need to come up with a way to get rid of that stuff, or even better, to change the status of it so that it's last year's gifts.
I have a couple other ideas too. Perhaps my mind has percolated a way to remedy the problem of adding something to the list that you really, really need, and then needing it too badly to wait for it as a gift. Since the system wouldn't be able to tell you that it was bought, you shouldn't be allowed to remove things from the list when you add them. I need to adjust this behavior so that there is an out.
Pat suggested adding some kind of time-out to the gift when you add it. As in, "If you all don't buy this for me before date X, I will buy it for myself." I still don't think that works, because if it was bought, you would get to know about the gift ahead of time. As you can see, more thought is required.
I've been considering writing some miniprojects such as Wish List Live for extra fun cash. I found a site that offers buyers and sellers of small contract jobs. They're usually personal projects for small funds. This is exactly the type of thing I would be interested in. Unfortunately, they want a SSN to register, and I just don't feel comfortable giving that to them.
Strangely, this feeling is mostly predicated on the fact that I don't like the way their site looks. I handed my SSN over to Amazon for the affiliate program readily. (They both need it for income tax purposes.)
