If you’re considering a baby shower, or even want an easy way to keep up with a wish list of baby items (and maybe share those with family or friends), a baby registry is an excellent choice. Many major retailers have registries (and signing up at multiple ones can provide significant benefits, like completion discounts or unique welcome gifts). However, if you’re looking for one registry to rule them all, we recommend what we used for ours: Babylist.
Why Babylist?
There are multiple reasons why we love Babylist. We looked across several of the major competitors, like Target, Amazon, or even Buy Buy Baby, but ultimately settled for Babylist because of their simple and clean experience.
Not only did we find Babylist incredibly easy to use, but we were also impressed with their product recommendations, guides for different needs, and personalized support. After signing up, we received a personal email that asked if there was anything they could do to help or support. With a team of plenty of moms, they have a strong network and experience to provide trusted recommendations. Since we were adopting, we knew that would be a slightly different type of situation. (We’re adopting a newborn, but we could just as easily be adopting a child who’s already several years old, in which case we might not need some of the ‘basics’ that most people think of.) We were delighted when they were quick to respond, giving us several additional guides and recommendations geared toward adopting parents.
On top of all of this, another standout feature of Babylist was that as we added items, Babylist would link them across multiple retailers, so our friends and family could find the best price for each item.
Getting Started with Babylist
Starting your registry with Babylist is super quick and easy. You can start from their website or download their iOS or Android app. For this overview, we’ll be showing their iOS experience.
After a few simple questions to get you started (and fine-tune recommendations), you’ll land on the hub of your registry. From here, you can add new items, or if you have another registry already, you can import or link them together. As you scroll through the page, you’ll see some great recommendations to get you started as well.
If you have a partner, you can also add them to your Babylist registry to make it easier for them to add and track gifts too.
Adding New Items To Your Registry
Babylist also has a store, which is a great place to start your search for new items. But the way we found most useful for adding items was to use their browser shortcut. Installing it is a snap (they walk you through it), and once you have it installed, as you’re browsing around the internet, you tap that button, and a new window will open and let you add some additional details before it’s added to your registry.
On mobile, this works similarly as well. As you’re browsing about the web, you can pop over to that shortcut bookmark, and it’ll look for a product on the last web page you were on. My preferred way is to use iOS’s ‘Share To’ feature, which gives you an even faster way to send the information to your Babylist.
When adding something to your registry, make sure you double-check the category. It should automatically set to the correct category if it can, but if it cannot, it’ll default to General. Also, feel free to mark specific items as ‘must-haves.’ Some registry shoppers want to help you with the most essential things on your list, and this helps call attention to them.
Finally, you’ll also have the option to add any additional notes if needed. Thinking about things like ‘size’ or ‘color’ is helpful. We added several baby books for our registry and used this spot to indicate that we’d prefer board books for durability.
Importing Items From Another Registry
Another great feature of Babylist is adding items from other registries, like at Amazon or Target. Adding other registries is perfect if you’ve already started another registry, or for whatever reason, want to maintain multiple ones.
There are two options: you can either transfer items to this registry (this is what we chose) or add a link to the other registry. The second option is ideal if you want to keep multiple registries, but only want to worry about sharing one link.
We chose to import our original Amazon and Target registries and then just focused on Babylist. Keeping your traditional registry (like at Target or Buy Buy Baby) might still be important for you, especially if you have friends or family who prefer going to a brick and mortar store to shop.
Adding Funds or Favors
One of the cool features of Babylist is the ability to add additional ‘items’ on your list, like favors or funds. You can add “favors” so that your friends and loved ones can offer you extra help, like for babysitting or dog walking or even home-cooked meals.
Another great option is for cash funds, which will invite friends and family to contribute towards a much larger gift, such as a childcare fund, college fund, or more. We found using this for a diaper fund was helpful.
Sharing Your Registry
Babylist makes it incredibly easy to share your registry with friends and family. Your registry has a personalized link you can share with others. And of course, you can customize that link too. If you’re going completely digital, this is a great option. If you’d prefer to go the physical route, Babylist offers free little cards with a generic Babylist link on it, which you can include with baby shower invites.
Purchasing From The Registry
As I mentioned above, Babylist shows you the retailer’s price where you added the product. But it will also search across places like Target, Walmart, or Amazon and list those as well, helping make price comparisons easier.
When someone chooses an item from your registry, they can either mark it as ‘reserved’ or mark that they’ve already purchased it (if they didn’t go through your registry).
We found that usually, this worked for most folks. But occasionally, someone would purchase an item, and then once they were at Amazon or Target’s website, they’d add one or two extra things that they might have also seen on the registry. When this happens, the registry doesn’t automatically update, so we recommend that you check in on it and keep it updated for any additional gifts that might pop up.
Gift Reservations
As soon as someone reserves a gift, Babylist will send you an email sharing the good news. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t mind spoilers, you can launch the app and see who is giving you something, and what it is. This can be a little disconcerting, though, as we found that friends would often ‘reserve’ items, and then come back and choose something else later.
Gift Tracker
Babylist also gives you a simplified view where you can quickly see who all has reserved or gifted items and any gift messages they added to it.
You can download a CSV (comma-separated value list) file of all the gifts, the senders, contact information, and order numbers on the Babylist website.
Unfortunately, not all of your gifts may come from this list. And unless you want to manually add other items, and then mark them as purchased, this tracker will be incomplete. The gift tracker is a great first step, and will probably work for many. We chose to go a step further, keeping a separate list of each item, and using it as a reminder if we’d received it and sent a thank you note.
Simple Returns
In the inevitable case where you need to return or exchange something, Babylist does a spectacular job of handling returns.
Suppose the original item was purchased through a partner retailer, like Amazon. In that case, you can start the return process from Babylist, and you’ll be transferred over to that retailer to finish up.
If the gift is from Babylist, they’ll generate a return barcode and label right there on the spot. Make sure you read their complete return policy, though, as you’ll want to ensure you don’t open any items until you’re sure you won’t need to return or exchange them.
Final Thoughts
This is just the surface of all the great things that Babylist has to offer. From additional guides and personalized support to weekly notifications of price changes to your list, we feel that Babylist stands out from the competitors.
And on the topic of baby registries, if you’re curious to learn more, check out some of our top tips and hacks for getting the most out of your registry experience.
