Getting the most from your Paperless Wedding gift list

Whatever your opinion of the need for wedding lists today, the fact is that most wedding guests want to give a gift to wish you well in your marriage – so it's better to get the stuff you want.  At a wedding that a friend of mine went to in Adelaide recently, the wedding couple didn't distribute a gift list, since they didn't need any kitchen stuff, so all their friends got them toasters - literally all of them, they got about 20!  Fortunately it was all a big ruse and they'd actually all got them gift vouchers for a travel agent too, but just imagine how they were feeling while unwrapping their 20^th toaster.

With Paperless Wedding, we want the invite and site to replace what would normally be sent out in the wedding invitation envelope, so that naturally led us to adding a gift list option to the site.  We also wanted to allow complete freedom in choosing exactly what you want, rather than being restricted like a traditional department store gift registry.  The way we've done this is by letting couples create gifts themselves by tapping in a title and a description and then uploading an image (make sure it's copyright free though).

You also give the gift a value and that is the amount paid by your guest when they purchase – no fees apply to them, we then charge an 8% fee when we transfer the money over to you, this is to cover our payment fees and admin.  You can choose whether to pass this on to your guests or cover it yourself.  So that means that the only thing restricting your gift list is your imagination!

After our wedding we honeymooned in Thailand, so we asked for cool stuff to do while we were there, which we then blogged about and sent the blog entries and pictures to our guests along with a thank you note (which is also coming to Paperless soon).  This mean that we had a load of fantastic experiences like Riding Elephants, a Thai Massage at the national school, Cocktails on the roof of a spectacular Bangkok Hotel and 2 nights in an awesome resort on Koh Samui, quite a lot of which we would have been struggling to justify otherwise.  So, if you don't need a new cutlery set, you could make your honeymoon really special and have some great stories to bring back.  If you'd rather stick to those items which last a lifetime, then you can do that too.