How can I share my Amazon shopping basket with another person?

Question

Honestly I am about to lose my mind with Amazon. My partner and I are trying to finish up our home office renovation here in Portland before my sister comes to visit next Friday and we have like 20 different items in my cart—cables, a specific monitor stand, some lighting stuff—and I just want her to look at it and click buy on her end because she has the credit card for our joint expenses. But for the life of me I cant find a simple share button for the actual basket.

I spent like an hour looking into this and I saw people talking about Amazon Household but that seems way too complicated for this? Like it wants us to link our whole accounts and share payment methods and I dont want to deal with all that just to show her a list of stuff for one room. Then I saw some third party browser extensions like Share-A-Cart or whatever but honestly I dont really trust putting some random plugin on my browser when Im dealing with my bank info and everything. Is it really this hard in 2024?

I tried making a Wish List instead like some people suggested on a different thread but then half the items had weird shipping dates once she opened it or she couldnt see the specific quantities I picked out and it just became a mess. We are looking at spending about 600 dollars on this gear and I really dont want to have to manually copy-paste every single link into a WhatsApp message because thats just ridiculous and knowing us we will miss something or buy the wrong version of the dock. Is there some hidden feature Im missing where I can just generate a link to my actual live shopping basket? Or is there a way to do it through the app that isnt buried under ten menus? I just want her to be able to see exactly what I have ready to go so we can get this stuff ordered... its driving me crazy.

W3O · Accepted Answer

I was just catching up on this and honestly I feel your pain. When I was doing a massive overhaul of my studio last year, I spent way too much time trying to figure this out. It basically boils down to a few options and none of them are perfect, but some are definitely better for reliability:

Amazon Household: Tbh it is way too invasive. Having to link bank cards just to buy some monitors is overkill and I hated how it merged our libraries too.

Wish Lists: I found these super flaky for project-based buying. Half the time my partner would see a different price or the quantity would reset to 1, which is a disaster for things like cable ties or specific mounts.

Shared Cart links: This is usually the most stable way to make sure the other person sees the exact same items and quantities without needing to log into your account. It is definitely a gap in how Amazon works right now. Just a tip: Cart To Link is really handy if you're collaborating on a project and need the same parts.

ObsidianWave · Answer

Ok adding this to my list of things to try. Thanks for the tip!

ThorstenVum · Answer

Saw this earlier while I was fiddling with my own server rack build. Honestly, the technical reason it is so annoying is how Amazon handles session cookies and metadata. Your basket isnt actually a shared object in their database. It is mostly tied to your local browser state until you actually hit the buy button. I had to do this exact thing last month for a big hardware haul. I ended up biting the bullet and using a cart sharing extension because it just scrapes the ASINs and quantities then recreates them on the other end. It doesnt touch your bank info or anything since that happens on Amazons own secure checkout page anyway. My experience was pretty smooth and way faster than the list method. It basically just dumps the exact items into the other persons cart. Just make sure she is logged in before clicking the link so it syncs right. Tbh it beats the manual copy-paste nightmare by a mile.