The high of the baby shower is starting to fade (can we do that every weekend?) and I’m currently staring at a large wall of boxes and gifts bags filled to the brim with baby gear, clothes, and gifts that I’m trying to figure out where we’re going to put! Registering was so much fun for the baby, but admittedly a little overwhelming too given all of the choices out there! While the experience is still fresh in mind, I thought it would be helpful to share a few thoughts on the various places I considered building our baby registry, and where we ended up registering. There were so many pros and cons to each site, and I ended up being happy with our choice to put the majority of our registry items on Amazon, with a few speciality items on a universal registry service like Babylistimg_5570-1

Big Box Baby Stores. Before I officially started my baby registry I started by browsing some of the big-box baby stores like Babies R Us and Buy Buy Baby. These places are great for gathering ideas and trying things in person. I went with one of my girlfriends and we walked around the store for over 2 hours testing the big-ticket items like baby carriers, strollers, car seats. I was happy we did this because some of my assumptions about pieces I liked online were totally different in person (for example, I’m super short, and found most strollers to be way to tall and bulky for me!). The downside of these big stores is that they have a huge selection but it can be overwhelming — when we first walked in I may have had to do a little deep breathing to peel myself away from the 600 pacifier options. Ultimately I decided not to register at one of these stores because while their selection was vast, the prices were a bit higher than other online retailers and they lacked some of the more stylish, speciality items that I was eyeing. (I should note that I would put Target in this category too, and found that they had really limited selection in-stores, and online a lot of items I would look for would be listed as sold-out online — which ultimately made me discount them as a registry possibility.)

Babylist. I was drawn to Babylist at first because it was so clean and modern — aesthetics and usability always make a big difference in my book! It’s a universal registry, so you can add items from any website. This was key for me because I found tons of items that I wanted to include in my registry from Etsy vendors, small online shops and various home brands for the nursery (which allowed me to mix and match bedding and other textiles!). There were also some children’s apparel brands like Boden and Baby Gap that I wanted to include pieces from, and that was nice to be able to add them to the list. The drawbacks of a site like this are that your guests are buying gifts from various stores, so the shipping can add up if you don’t have multiple items from the same store listed. Guests also have to go back and mark that the item they bought was “reserved” by them since they’re completing the purchase on another site, which might be confusing for folks that are less tech-savvy. We ended up using this for our registry and didn’t have any issues with duplicate gifts though!

Baby Furniture Stores. I had so much fun browsing these sites for nursery essentials, crib bedding, and really darling toys and accessories in some of the baby furniture retailers like Land of the Nod and Pottery Barn Baby. The benefit of these places is the selection and I loved all of the bedding options, plus there’s lots of fun gifts that can be monogrammed. The downside is that you can’t find everything you need on these sites for the registry. For me, I wanted to mix and match pieces from several retailers, so I pulled some of the pieces from these stores that I liked, and added them to the Babylist registry.

Amazon.com. Amazon was ultimately my favorite resource for our baby registry for all of the reasons that Amazon is usually great resource for any type of shopping. If I found something I liked on another store’s website, or in person, I’d try to find out the brand and look for it on Amazon and 9 out of 10 times I’d be able to find it on there (and usually for the best price!).There is so much to search through that you do have to go in with a plan of what you’re looking for, I found Amazon as a research tool pretty overwhelming. There are so many reviews, but when it comes to baby products the reviews can get very polarizing and intense — they’re helpful, but you have to take some of them with a grain of salt or you’ll become completely paranoid that nothing is safe. Amazon also has some nice registry features like completion discounts, a really great thank you note manager, and a very easy returns process. My only drawback to the Amazon registry was that I felt I had to check in every few days because there are so many sellers that a few items would go in and out of stock, and I’d have to swap them out for other products that were available. Ultimately it’s what we used for the majority of our registry, and I heard great feedback from my friends and family that they loved that it was so easy to order things and receive them quickly from Amazon.

Amazon and Babylist ended up being the right choices for us, and I’m happy with how both of them worked out. After we have the baby I’ll share another post about what we registered for, and what I think worked well for us — can’t wait to get the chance to try all of this fun stuff out!

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