Amazon Assistant for Chrome Discountinued. Now what?

The Amazon Assistant Chrome extension was discontinued on March 28 2023. This means you can no longer add items to your Amazon Lists, Registries and Gift Lists from other stores. In this article, I will explain how this will affect Amazon List users and your alternatives for replacing Amazon Assistant.

What was Amazon Assistant?

Amazon Assistant was a browser extension that, until March 2023, enabled you to add items to your Amazon List from other websites. This was a popular browser add-on for Chrome, Edge and Firefox users for two reasons:

1. It allowed you to compare the prices of products on other websites to the equivalent Amazon product.

2. It allowed you to include products from other stores in your Amazon Lists

Below is what it looked like when you were adding an item from another store.

What happened? Why did the Amazon Assistant add-on stop working?

The official message from Amazon is as follows:

"We have made the decision to discontinue Amazon Assistant on 28 March 2023. From that date you will no longer be able to use Amazon Assistant. You will still have access on Amazon to Lists you have already created with Amazon Assistant and the products you previously added from other sites will remain. We apologise for any inconvenience this decision may cause you."

Amazon does not explicitly say why this is, but given the timing, it's likely related to a major update Chrome is making to browser extensions. With the aim of improving security, performance, and privacy, Chrome extensions are moving from Manifest V2 to V3 (source).

This requires extensions to be more transparent in how they work and therefore how they are built and operate. It's likely that the Amazon Assistant extension did not comply with these new requirements and therefore needed to be re-built or decommissioned.

Of course, it could be for other reasons, e.g. Amazon may have decided they don't want people leaving their marketplace to buy items from competing stores anymore.

How does this affect my Amazon Lists?

In short, you can no longer use Amazon Assistant to add items to your Amazon Lists, Registries or Gift Lists from retailers outside of Amazon.

Products you have already added to your Amazon Lists will still be there and you can still add products from the Amazon website.

Similar extensions like 'Add to Amazon Wish List' also no longer work. Basically, there is no way for us to add external items to Amazon Lists anymore.

So, if you want to keep track of items from multiple sites or create and share gift lists that include products outside of Amazon, you will need a replacement.

What are the best Amazon Assistant Alternatives?

The good news if you're looking for an alternative universal wishlist extension, there are plenty available for you to choose from.

Whether you are making a personal wishlist, baby registry, wedding registry or some other gift list, choosing the best replacement for your 'Amazon Assistant' or 'Add to Amazon Wish List' plugin is simply a matter of finding what's best for you.

I have signed up, downloaded and tested each of the 10 most popular universal wishlist tools for you. You can read my in-depth review of each of them.

If you just want to know the outcomes of the research though, here is what I found:

Chrome users (desktop): Moonsift has the highest rating (5 stars on Chrome), works consistently well and is acclaimed for its clean design. It is also the only option that gives you price updates.

Safari (desktop): Giftster's extension is one of the few that works on Safari, the only major downsides are the outdated design and slower running speed.

Android users: Wishupon (4.3 stars)

iOS users: Universal wishlist by Moonsift (4.5 stars)