I need serious international registry advice. The gist of it is, I live in the US, but am having the wedding in Vancouver, BC. And while it may be against wedding etiquette to bring gifts to a wedding, that’s what most people do anyway. To avoid driving across the border with $1000 worth of kitchen appliances, I’m hoping to register only online, and despite the fact that 98% of my guests are Canadian, only at American stores.
I am considering registering for a small handful of things from The Bay to not be too pretentious, but what are your throughts on this? Is it too much to ask of our guests to only purchase gifts online?
My other brief thought was that if you set up a registry through myregistry.com, you can add items from the smallest boutiques with no online presence to the largest shops of all. Is this true? Does this work well? Are they going to sell my information?
How did you handle your international registry and guests bringing gifts to the wedding?
If you register online, your guests can still purchase items in-store at most shops. The whole American/Canadian guest issue makes it more complicated though.
What about Amazon.com? They have practically everything available and ship both to US and Canadian locations. Many people are familiar with Amazon as a retailer enough to feel comfortable using their interface.
I’m using thingsiwant.com which is similar to myregistry.com. While no one has actually bought anything from my registry (my shower’s not til May), I find it extremely easy to use. I have received no spam. Good Luck!
My only thought is - and I’m sure many bees know more about this than I do - I have tried in the past (as a resident of the US) to purchase things online from Canadian stores that have a presence in both the US and Canada - and they won’t ship to me in the US. Very frustrating, since often the Canadian branch of the store has better stuff than ours (Roots Canada in particular). So I have no idea what the problems may be with Canadians trying to direct-ship from Canadian stores to the US??!? Wouldn’t you think that NAFTA would have solved the problem of how to get a really nice Roots sweatshirt without driving across the border?
I’ve been using myregistry.com, and we just received our first gift (from Crate and Barrel, through myregistry.com) with no problems!
I have items on myregistry.com from all over, including Amazon.com, Overstock.com, etc.
Hey, with the American dollar so cheap, they should be happy if you register only at American stores!
I really don’t see what the problem is - the guests who would have brought gifts to the wedding anyway, regardless of where you were registered, will do so, and the ones who plan ahead and follow directions will get you something online. American department stores accept Canadian credit cards, don’t they?
I don’t know much about the international angle — sorry! But just wanted to give you another “link to anything, anywhere” registry. The Alternative Gift Registry (www.alternativegiftregistry.org) is run by a non-profit, so you don’t need to worry about them taking advantage of your info.
We used it, and the main problem was that most people go with what they know and so went to our regular-store registries instead. But I found it easy to use, and I loved the link-to-anything aspect.
I am using http://www.bgregistry.com
Same idea as myregistry, I guess. It’s working ok for me, and people purchased things off it for christmas presents too! I have things from Canadian and American stores on there.
to be completely honest i personally would not register online only for a number of reasons. However the main reason being that many of my relatives (particularly older ones) would have no idea how purchase anything online, and would be very annoyed if i did. Also one of my friends registered online as well as in store, and i was going to buy online, but the site did not show pictures of the products or offer good descriptions. i ended up not buying from there because i wanted to know exactly what i was buying her
I live in Canada and have bought a few things online from major US stores (like Macy’s) and have had difficulty with it. I think that at least some of your guests would like the option of being able to go to a store where they live to pick something out, I know I would. Also, Amazon.ca is very different than Amazon.com. As far as I know Amazon.ca is mostly books, cd’s and dvd’s and not housewares.
We live in Australia but all of my family are in the USA. Although we’re having an AHR in California, we decided to go with just one online registry with an Australian department store - we’ve also asked my parents to gently spread the word that we’d appreciate either gifts from the registry, or just the pleasure of their company - but please don’t bring items to the AHR. It might not be perfect etiquette, but we don’t want to get stuck with trying to get stuff shipped back here.
I basically set up our entire registry online (except for our dinnerware from Crate and Barrel which I went to the store to look at first, and then went home and did online), and had no issues. I also did myregistry.com and it worked well. The only thing was that none of my guests used it 
But had they, it would have worked fine too. I know this because I had to go in and pretend to purchase somethings for us so that it would show up on the registry as already purchased.
mrs corn, if no one used it, where did you receive all of your gifts from?
I can sympathize. We had our engagement party in Quebec and tried to deal with the same registry problem. But we found the online registries to be so cumbersome for cross country registries- especially La Baie. But we *loved* Canadian Tire since we could do everything from far away without ever going into a store. We were also living in GA (me)/MA (him) and about to make the cross-country move to Seattle. As a result, pretty much everyone gave us cash or donated to our charity registry. It worked perfectly. Best of Luck as it seems Canadian Tire might not work for you in this case- although it seems most Canadians (my fiance not me) thought it odd to register at Canadian Tire (I still don’t quite get it- the CT $$ and all) and it might even encourage cash gifts.
On myregistry.com I didn’t see Potterybarn or Williams-Sonoma, which are two of my favorite stores! I think I will stick to their seperate websites.
We (Americans) went to a Canadian wedding in Vancouver and stopped by the Bay to find a wedding gift. I imagine most people will fit it into their schedule or give you money. The border patrol was ALL OVER US when we said we were going to a wedding and asked all sorts of questions about if we were bringing a gift, etc. so I’d definitely clue your friends in if they’re crossing the border. I think it’s probably just easy to buy in-country.
We attended a wedding in Vancouver last year and I want to say they registered at The Bay, in any case, I ordered a spice rack online from their registry that I never laid eyes on, it got picked up by the groom at a later date. Hope it was nice! I’ll never know!
About a 1/3 of our guests are coming from the UK so we had problems with our registry too. Most stores don’t allow International credit cards to be used online. They only accept them if the customers call a 1-800 number which we felt was a big pain for people. Target is the only store we found in the US that is set up to accept International credit cards online, so we registered at Target, but only told UK guests about it so that they had things to choose from. It’s now known as our “secret registry.” We’ve registered at other stores for US guests.
Along the same lines as Meg, above, I have found that Macy’s is one of the only American stores that will accept Canadian credit cards on the website (most websites don’t allow for a province and postal code on the billing address). Macy’s will then ship the purchases to you (in the US). However, I find them to be overpriced.
We have the exact same problem - I’m Canadian from T.O.; my fiance’s American from San Fran; and we live in NYC. The wedding is in Toronto. William Ashley will ship to the US and apply the GST and PST to the duty for shipping - but I think they only have a store in Toronto. Their website is really good though. I’m starting to think gift cards are the way to go in order to avoid problems with customs in addition to one registry at one actual store in each country. The main thing is the shipping and hassles at the border. Plus, shipping is bad for us as we don’t have a doorman to receive packages for us in our building.
It’s such a nightmare!
I have a friend who was looking into registering both in Canada and in the US she found that linen n things, bed bath and beyond, sears and walmart all had both U.S. and CA branches. Also there are Williams-Sonoma in Canada as well (not sure about their registry capabilities in Canada) I think she ended up registering at Williams-Sonoma and then forwarding the older relatives in Canada a list from the online registry so they could go in and buy — I could be wrong about that last part. . . .
[...] know I’ve touched on the privacy issue before, even specifically as it relates to myregistry.com, but if there are any girls that want to give [...]
I, too, am dealing with the US/Canada registry problem. I’ve asked at most of the common stores (LnT, BB&B, W-S, Pottery Barn, etc.), and even if there are branches in both countries, the registries are completely separate. US online registires often won’t accept non-US credit cards (as mentioned above), and you cannot access the registry in the store if it was started in the other country. The only exception I’ve found so far is Restoration Hardware, who has a few Canadian stores now. I think my only solution is to provide my international guests with the customer service phone numbers so they can make purchases over the phone 
Well, I actually have family in Canada who were coming to my wedding and I found that using MyRegistry.com took care of any problems with registering. You can add gifts from any store in the world, so I was able to make sure that the stuff I chose would be easy for any of my family members to buy no matter what location they’re in. Noone had any problems with it, and my wedding registry worked out well.
Mrs. Milkshake, Seattle/Vancouver, BC
Age and Occupation: 23, Pharmacist
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 25, Pharmacist
Engagement Date: May 2007
Wedding Date: August 2008
Blogging Since: December 6, 2007
Venue: Victorian Mansion
About Me: Despite the fact that I’ve invested many long years of my life studying the sciences in college, I’m glad to be out of there and I would never do it again! I’m super artsy at heart - I run an indie craft site, I grew up shooting and developing my own film, doing jazz and ballet, and the whole gamut of art classes. I’ve been called a Jane of all Trades… but I was also told many years ago not to make my passion my career because it’d suck the fun out of it. Hence my choice of day job. We live in Seattle but are having our wedding in Canada to be fair to all our family and friends.
International registry is driving me nuts! We are having the problem in the opposite direction. 98% of our guests are Americans, but we live in Canada. I can’t believe what a hassle this registering has been.