Online gift registries are getting popular these days, and who can blame the happy couple? They’re so easy and can be customized to the soon-to-be bride and groom’s needs, especially with all the available sites out there like DepositAGift and MyRegistry. As a wedding guest, if you pick a gift that can be ordered online and shipped to your house that’s great. All that’s left to do is wrap it. For guests that choose to deposit cash to be used by the bride and groom however they please that’s awesome, you’re a great friend, but do you want to show up to the wedding empty handed? I would still feel the need to have something to leave on the gift table. Since you’ve already given them a gift, there’s no need to repeat that gesture. Just follow up your online gift with an adorable, hand selected and written card in the theme of your cash contribution. It is a thoughtful way to draw the couples’ attention to your online gift as well as a great way to add a personal touch to your wedding gift.

well wishes for their tropical honeymoon

If you contributed to a honeymoon fund, why not pick a vacation themed card?

humor can work at weddings too

If you’re cash gift is more likely to go towards decorating their new home or remodeling their house, something funny like this card could work.

classic black and white kissing photo

Or a simple ‘congratulations’ will do.

Wedding registries can turn into quite an ordeal. What, where and how much should you register for? If you skip a registration will your guests take that hint that what you really need is money? Decisions, decisions. The modern bride alternative to a traditional registry in stores with a scanning gun is an online registry. Let’s face it, most of your wedding guests know how to, and maybe even prefer, shopping online these days. And online wedding registries like amazon.com allow you to register for everything you could possibly want in one place.

Amazon wedding registry

I love Amazon, maybe not as much as Etsy but still. Amazon allows you to find cheaper prices for almost everything and actually has practically everything. Sometimes I start on Amazon when I do my online shopping but don’t actually make a purchase there. Say I’m looking for a teapot to send my mother for mother’s day. I searched teapots on Amazon to look at all of the size and style options. Then once I picked those elements I checked my favorite, smaller sites to get a more unique gift using the elements I picked as a guide.

So maybe if you don’t use Amazon for your gift registry, you can at least use it to find some inspiration.

The wedding registry.  Some people cannot wait to register and to start furnishing their imaginary dream home.  Others abhor the idea of picking out “china” and the typical stuff that comes to mind when one thinks of a wedding registry.  But there is another situation that a lot of  modern brides and grooms-to-be are facing in this modern age - the “we’ve already got everything” phenomenon!

A lot of couples live together before they’re married, and they’ve already spent their hard-earned cash on little domestic perks here and there - an all-clad pot, a really adorable dish set from ikea, a sweet new couch.  Put your stuff together and multiply by the number of years you’ve been out of college and it’s likely that your apartment storage space is already as packed as grandma’s attic.

If the thought of a registry just doesn’t make any sense, but people are putting the pressure on you to get one, check out this little gem: The Amazon.com wedding registry.

I actually used it for my own wedding.  My hubby and I already had plenty of stuff, so a registry seemed kind of ridiculous, but the requests kept rolling in.  I attempted to register at Williams-Sonoma, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Cute stuff, but the sticker shock nearly threw me into convulsions .  I figured most of my family would have a similar reaction.

Amazon.com came through for us.  We shop on Amazon incessantly anyways, so it just seemed natural.  We didn’t have to leave the house to register, they had more than just the typical kitchen and home stuff (think Wii, board games, movies, and coffee table books), and everything is reasonably priced!  You can’t go wrong.  Check out a little snapshot of what our registry looked like:

Check out all the cool stuff!

One cool thing about the Amazon registry is that you can view what other people are adding to their own registries by region of the US.  The most popular item by far when we were registering was the Nintendo Wii.  Pretty cool.  We registered for a bunch of coffee table photography books, board games, and blu ray movies.

The registry worked really well for my bridal shower because a lot of my friends are cross-country and couldn’t make it.  They just went online, picked something, and it was sent right to the house.  For the actual wedding, some of the older folk didn’t quite get it, so most ended up just giving us cash (which we certainly didn’t mind).  Registry problem solved