Our experience of setting up a gift list (John Lewis Wedding List)

Member Name: ariom

Product:	John Lewis Wedding List
Date:	13/10/08 (184 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: convenient, online, keeps you updated, wide choice, good customer service with returns.

Disadvantages: not easy for people to get to a store, product quality not what you'd expect for the price

We got married on 7th April 2007. When we started planning our wedding we set up gift lists with John Lewis and with Argos. The majority of our guests chose to purchase from our John Lewis list. This was because they believed the products to be higher quality/a better gift, they could easily purchase and access the gift list online and also down to the particular choice of gifts we had on this list being a bit more weddingy and a bit less practical.

My husband hates shops/towns and anywhere that is busy! This made John Lewis's list ideal as we were able to set it all up online. The disadvantage of this is not being able to actually see the products, and the range of products on the website is slightly more limited than in store. There are a number of local John Lewis stores to us where we could have set up the list if needed, and they have quite a good representation across England, though aren't always on the high street or in easily accessible town centre locations. We found the products on John Lewis slightly more expensive than we had seen elsewhere, but also we anticipated them to be higher quality because of this. It was still possible to set up a list with a range of price points for our guests to choose from.

Once we had set up the list we were sent a number of cards which we could send out with invites and a print out of the list. We were able to track who had purchased what and what was still available online. This is useful if, like me, you want to make a crafty head-start on your thank you letters!

The guests who chose not to buy off John Lewis were the older guests who were less internet savvy. They found John Lewis hard to access as a physical store and would have preferred to see the items they were purchasing.

Our products arrived a week after we returned from honeymoon. We were able to specify a delivery day so we knew we'd be in. The items were well packed in bubble wrap. On the couple of items they had been unable to supply they had offered us higher priced (much higher priced in one case) alternatives.

When we opened the products we have been disappointed by the quality of a few of them. Some of the picture frames came with dents and scratches on, and a chess set had a misaligned board. We took both of these items back to our local John Lewis who were happy to swop them for us with no quibbles or questions asked (though we did notice they put the products we had returned straight out onto the shelves). A bread bin we had began to rust quite early on. Overall, I don't feel the products were good value and represented the higher price that they charged.

Summary: good to set up, products not to the same standard.