Reserve gifts on a wishlist

Reservations fix the oldest problem with wishlists: two people buy the same thing. Turn them on for a public list and your visitors can quietly claim an item, so everyone else knows to pick something else.

Turn reservations on

1. Open the list and tap Edit.
2. Make sure the list is Public — reservations only work on lists other people can see.
3. Check Let visitors reserve gifts.
4. Pick Who can reserve: Anyone signed in, or Only mutual friends (people you follow who also follow you back).
5. Save.

The list tab now reads With reservations, and the list page tells visitors who may reserve on it.

How reserving works

1. Open the list and tap the item.
2. Tap Reserve.

There's no dialog and nothing else to decide. Reserving needs an account — a logged-out visitor who taps Reserve is sent to sign-in and lands back on the same item.

To undo it, tap Cancel reservation on the item. Everything you're holding is also listed under My reservations on your Friends page, where you can cancel without hunting for the list again.

You can't reserve your own items, and an item the owner has already marked as owned can't be reserved by anyone.

Reservations are anonymous

Nobody ever learns who reserved what — not the other visitors, and not the list owner. Here's everything that is shown:

• On the list, a reserved item carries a Reserved! badge.
• Open the item and you see an anonymous count, like 1 person reserved this.
• If the reservation is yours, it says Reserved by you instead, with the cancel button.

Nobody gets an email about a reservation, so the only way to find out is to look at the list. That cuts both ways: because the badge is on your own list too, you'll know an item has been claimed — just never by whom.

When two people want the same gift

Reservations are a signal, not a lock. If somebody got there first, the button reads Reserve anyway with a note asking you to use it only if you still plan to buy the item. Both reservations then count, and the item shows 2 people reserved this.

Limits

• Mutual friends can reserve as much as they like.
• Everyone else can hold up to 3 reservations per profile at a time. Cancel one to free up a slot, or become mutual friends to lift the cap.
• On a mutual friends only list, everybody else sees the reason they can't reserve instead of the button.

When reservations end

A reservation goes away when:

• 30 days pass — reservations expire on their own, so an abandoned one never blocks a list forever.
• The reserver cancels it.
• You mark the item as owned. You got the gift, so the reservation has done its job.
• The list stops being reservable — you made it private, or turned the toggle back off.

The last two keep a short grace period: undo the change within about ten minutes and the reservations come back untouched.

Where reservations show up

Only on the list page itself. Your EveryThing view and the rest of your profile never show reservation badges, because reservations belong to a list and its rules — the same item can sit in a list that takes reservations and one that doesn't.