How to share an Amazon wish list without giving out your address

Updated 11 September 2026

The worry is a fair one. A wish list is a thing you send to people, and an address is a thing you would rather not send to people, and on a shop that also handles delivery those two are tied together by default. Here is what is actually exposed, what the settings do, and where they stop.

What a shared list actually reveals

Three separate things can leak from a shop-hosted wish list, and they are worth keeping apart because the settings treat them differently.

The first is your identity: the name on the list, and often a photo. The second is your location, usually as a town or region shown to somebody buying from the list. The third is your full delivery address, which is the one people actually worry about and the one that is hidden by default in the normal gifting flow.

So the common fear — that sharing a list posts your street address to anybody with the link — is not how it works. The quieter problem is the first two: a list shared widely is a page with your real name on it, and frequently enough detail to identify you.

How the gift address setting works

The mechanism is the same wherever a shop offers it. You keep a delivery address on file against the list. Somebody buying a gift from that list selects it at checkout, the parcel is sent to that stored address, and the buyer never sees it — they see your name and, typically, a town or region so they know which country they are shipping to.

It is genuinely effective at the thing it does. The caveat is that it only applies when the buyer goes through the gifting flow attached to the list. Somebody who reads your list, opens a new tab and buys the item normally is buying a parcel that has to be posted to an address they will need from you.

These settings are also moved and renamed regularly. Rather than following instructions from an article, open your own list settings, look for the gift or delivery address option, and confirm what the preview shows before you share the link. That takes a minute and is the only version of this advice that will still be accurate in a year.

The setting people miss

Visibility is the one worth checking, and it is separate from the address. A list can typically be private, shared by link, or findable by search within the shop — and the third of those means somebody who knows your name can look you up and read what you want.

That is rarely what anybody intends. If your list is set to be findable, change it to link-only. A list shared by link is seen by the people you send the link to, which is almost always what "sharing a wish list" was meant to mean.

While you are there, check what name the list is published under. A full real name is not required for a list that only ever goes to people who already know you.

The limits you cannot configure away

Four of them, and they are structural rather than settings you have missed.

• It only covers one shop. Anything sold somewhere else cannot go on the list, so either the list is incomplete or you are running two of them. This is the limitation people actually hit.
• Marketplace and third-party items behave inconsistently. Whether the gifting flow — and therefore the hidden address — applies can depend on who is fulfilling the order. It is not always obvious from the listing.
• The buyer has to use the list to buy. Anybody who copies the item name and buys it elsewhere, or buys it in a shop, is outside the mechanism entirely.
• The page is a shop page. It carries recommendations, related products and prices that change while people are looking at it. A list is a personal document; a shop page is an advertisement that contains your list.

None of that makes the feature bad. It makes it a shipping convenience rather than a privacy tool, which is the accurate way to think about it.

What to use instead, and what it does not solve

A list that lives outside any one shop takes a different approach: it stores no address at all, because it never handles delivery. Items are links to wherever they are actually sold, and the page carries only what you typed.

Being straightforward about the trade-off: this does not make an address unnecessary. If somebody is posting you a parcel, they still need somewhere to post it, and they will ask. What changes is that the address is given once, to one person who is already buying you a present, rather than being configured into a page you send to thirty people.

Which one is right depends on what you want. If you buy almost everything from one shop and want parcels to arrive without any conversation, the shop-hosted list is doing a real job. If your list spans several shops, or includes things that are not bought online at all, it cannot.

Moving a list you already have

There is no import worth waiting for, and doing it by hand takes less time than people expect. Open your existing list, and paste each item’s link into the new one — the title, image and price come across from the shop page automatically.

It is also a good moment to cut it. Most long-standing wish lists contain several things the owner no longer wants and one or two they have already bought, and a list that has been pruned is considerably more useful to whoever is reading it.

Keep buying from whichever shop you like. A list of links is not a shop and takes no view on where anybody shops — the links point wherever you put them.

When you do have to give an address

Give it to the one person who asked, in a direct message, when they ask. Not in a group chat, not on the list itself, and not preemptively to everybody in case somebody needs it.

For anybody who would rather not give a home address at all, a work address or a parcel collection point solves it, and neither requires explaining yourself. And for a gift being handed over in person, the question does not arise — which covers most of what actually happens.