Appropriate # of Registries or Way to Combine Without Overwhelming?

You can copy URLs from other websites and put them on your Zola Registry - that’s what we have! And then you can check if you want people to give you money towards the gift or direct them to the website to purchase there. So then you can have a few things from multiple places listed on the same site, which is what I think you’re after

I would really limit the number of registries to 2-3. Orherwise, as you said, it can become overwhelming for your guests. I know The Knot just syncs your registries and shows all the items, but when you click on an item, it directs you to the registry page of that website. Honestly, in my experience, I have 2 registries, 1 at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and 1 at Wayfair. Almost no one has bought anything from the Wayfair one. People are just going to BBB. There were a few items Wayfair had that BBB didn't, but I moved everything else over to the BBB registry since that has been the more popular one. There is no minimum number of gifts that you have to register for with a company, at least not from my experience.

We used MyRegistry.com and haven’t had any trouble so far! You can create a registry and link it or you can just add singular items from any website. So far it’s been great!

View Quoted Comment

This is what we did too, but we used the knot

We had 4 registries... bed bath and beyond, a few things from best buy (only like 3 things though and no one ended up getting those), amazon, and traveler's joy. People used the 3 about equally.

We have two (Amazon and Bed Bath & Beyond), and our website is on the Knot, which puts everything together for you as mentioned above. I'd highly recommend using Amazon, because they make it really easy for you to divide up bigger gifts so that multiple people can contribute.

I did my wedding website on The Knot just so I could combine our three registries. We did Crate & Barrel, BB&B (in more physical places near most of our guests) and Wayfair (for those that love online shopping). I think it’s going to work out pretty well. When they view on our website, it all looks pretty seamless.

View Quoted Comment

We did this for Zola and just did Zola and Amazon but I want to point out a few cons:

1. Yes, it'll link to the item but Amazon would not let us link to the item on the registry. Just the item in general so if someone buys it, it won't show as purchased on our Amazon registry specifically. Not sure if this is an Amazon specific thing.

2. If you let people contribute cash to your item on Zola, they'll take the 2.5% cut out of it so you or they will have to pay more for the item than it actually retails for. Because of this, we chose not to accept Zola cash for any non-Zola items.

3. If you give them a link to re-direct to buy the item themselves, Zola will show your address they can mail it to. You can't put a password on a Zola registry. You can unlist your registry in the Zola directory and just give out the url but you can't put a password. So just to warn you, this means your address will be floating around out there for the internet metadata to scrape (though to be fair, its probably already out there on a White Pages sort of website).

I wanted to include items from a lot of different stores but because of these reasons, I basically just gave up and only did a minimal Zola and Amazon registry (With hopes of receiving cash to buy the other items later). Zola also tends to mostly partner with more expensive brands. In hindsight, I don't know that I would have used Zola.

View Quoted Comment Good to know - I knew about the cut that Zola takes but I didn’t know about the address thing. We pretty much only have Zola specific stuff and then links to our other registry on there but thanks for mentioning this!

I am register with Hitchd, which let's your guest make a cash gift to honey moon, wedding fund, travel expenses, lodging, etc. You name it they will let you make several gift request for cash. I love it, but have no idea how to add it to this site because it's not listed as a retailer...