High quality goods, great service and good fun too! (John Lewis Wedding List)

Member Name: Midrange

Product:	John Lewis Wedding List
Date:	05/09/08 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free delivery, in-store or online editting of list, straightforward (plus free tea and cake)

Disadvantages: Not all items available (several discontinued, no sale items allowed)

My wife and I got married in the middle of August this year. We chose John Lewis for our gift list because we both feel that the store provides a good, high quality range of all the typical "household" goods. We were completely overwhelmed by the generosity of our friends and family and were also generally impressed with the service John Lewis gave. Here's how it went...

* 3 months before wedding (too early apparently!)
We went into John Lewis together to enquire about setting up a gift list. We were advised to return to the store six weeks before the wedding. We were given lots of handy information though - all the usual things I suppose you'd expect from a gift list. For example, guests can order gifts online from a fully customizable list, gifts will be delivered to your home address (free of charge) 2 weeks after the wedding date, if a gift is not available then vouchers will be given instead. We were given a preliminary gift list number and went away to think about what we needed!

* Just over six weeks before the wedding
We returned to our local John Lewis store and had a fantastic day of scanning. We were given a small scanning/memory device and invited to go round the whole shop as we pleased, scanning in whatever items we'd like to add to our list. I took charge of the scanner for most of the time (lol, much to my wife's annoyance she told me later!) and we... well, went shopping! It was quite tricky at first to be honest. We're both rather conservative when it comes to spending and so were quite hesitant. Indeed, when we'd finished our 4 hour shopping marathon (yes, 4 hours - I loved every minute!) the lady at the gift list desk said how relatively little we had ordered! Some coupoles, she said, can really get carried away!
I can see why. John Lewis stocks just such beautiful stuff. And the scanner was so easy to use. It even showed you associated items - for example, if you scanned in "1 Aqua Blue Guest Towel", it would give you the option to view all the other towels.
We were warned that sale items shouldn't be added to our wedding list - as they were liable to come out of the sale before the wedding and so couldn't be purchased.
One of our favourite things about that epic shopping day (aside from the little scanner device) was the free tea and cake vouchers we received. We took a break midway through in the John Lewis café - enjoying not one, but TWO pots of tea and some millionaire shortbreads - fantastic stuff!

* The run up to the wedding
Our gift list went active six weeks before our wedding day. It was very exciting to log in every so often and see what our friends had bought us. Everyone could include a short message too. As the wedding day drew ever closer, we had to keep adding more and more items. This was easy to do (perhaps not quite as easy as going round the shop and physically "holding" the item, but still good fun).

* Delivery
As promised, our gifts arrived two weeks after our wedding. Sometime between 12noon and 6pm they told us in an email. The lorry arrived at 4pm - perfect timing for a long "gift unwrapping session" before dinner! The delivery man was friendly and brought all the boxes in for us. After he'd gone, we unpacked them at our leisure and tried to find places to put all our new things! The boxes came with an inventory. Very handy.

* Afterwards
Just before our gifts were delivered, John Lewis sent us an email with details of all the gifts they could not obtain for us (out of stock, discontinued, sale items etc.) Out of approximately 120 gifts, only about 10 were unavailable. The only ones my wife was bothered about were the teapot and the multicoloured, spotty rug. The gift vouchers will be delivered separately - indeed, we're expecting them to arrive in the post someday soon. We'll just have to make another trip to John Lewis in town and find some replacement items. The missing rug was quite disappointing for when we looked on their site it appears they don't do any spotty rugs at all now.

Summary: Great service and good communication between us and the store. Highly recommended