Online shopping can sometimes turn into something of a black hole: you start off looking for college textbooks, remember that movie that sounded a lot like one of the novels on your list, think about installing a home theater setup, and end up surfing somewhere between living-room décor and kitchenware until you remember why you started shopping in the first place. If that train of events sounds familiar, you could stand to organize your online shopping experience – and Amazon.com (News - Alert) might have just the way to do it.

Amazon recently unveiled its newest service, “Collections.” The feature offers a means of formatting an Amazon wish list so it appears, essentially, like a Pinterest board. Wish lists can now be sorted into categories like “My Style,” “Want List,” “Possibilities” or a title of the user’s choosing. Each category displays a spread of tiled thumbnails of the items within.

With Collections, users can browse what others have “collected” and add their favorite finds to their own lists with the click of a mouse. However, at this stage not all Amazon products are Collection-supported, so wish lists in this format might not contain everything the user actually wishes for. What’s more, unlike Pinterest, there is currently no way to use thumbnails for products outside of Amazon. 

The feature was released in beta to bloggers this past spring, and currently remains in a testing phase. It is reminiscent of Amazon’s previous feature Listmania, although that has since been phased out and certainly focused less on visuals than Collections is bound to feature.

With a style so similar to Pinterest and being backed by an e-commerce Goliath, Collections will ideally have a positive influence on the way Amazon customers shop. Indeed, Pinterest has been proven to generate shopping leads; the site accounted for 25 percent of retail referral traffic last April. If that is any indication of how Amazon Collections will do, it just may serve to boost their sales higher. According to an Amazon spokesperson, “This new test feature is just one of the many ways we are working to help our customers discover and share new things.”

Hopefully Collections serves to streamline our shopping experiences, and not suck us further into an abyss of distraction and desires while making purchases online.