Marking gifts as paid
We’re constantly looking for ways to make the experience of using a honeymoon gift list as simple, engaging and fun as possible — both for you as the couple receiving gifts, and for your guests in giving them. To that end, back in December, we introduced the Gift Review screen for guests, that acted a little like a checkout page on a traditional e-commerce site, summarising all the gifts that person had reserved, and allowing them to pay for them all in a single payment through PayPal.
This was a great success, and was really helpful for many guests who bought multiple items from a couple’s list. And since launching this feature, we’ve made some small adjustments, such as repeating your “thank-you” text on the Gift Review screen and making the page available to guests on lists that don’t use PayPal for payment.
However, because credit card payments for gifts reserved on Buy Our Honeymoon are paid directly into your own PayPal account, and not processed or handled by us in any way, we nonetheless still had an issue where we wouldn’t be able to tell automatically whether a payment had actually been made. This meant that guests who returned to a wedding list after making a purchase still saw a gift review screen that indicated, confusingly, that they were able to make a payment for the gifts they’d already bought. We also would occasionally hear from guests who wanted to confirm that their payment on PayPal had gone through, and we wouldn’t be able to help as fully as we’d have liked to.
It turned out that a solution to this was right there in the PayPal system — a solution which, as the site programmer for Buy Our Honeymoon, I’m frankly kicking myself I didn’t notice earlier. Consequently, we’ve now rolled out some further improvements:
- After a guest makes a payment into your PayPal account, they’ll now see a big orange button on the PayPal site marked “click here to mark your gifts as paid”. Clicking this will record their successful payment and grey out the gifts they’ve just paid for on their Gift Review screen.
- Guests can also use an “I have already paid for this item” link on the gift review screen itself to confirm payment for items that were bought prior to these changes, or that they’ve paid for by a different method.
- A guest’s Gift Review screen now shows both the grand total for gifts they’ve reserved through the site, and also the total value of gifts that they’ve yet to pay for.
We believe these changes serve to really integrate PayPal much more seamlessly into Buy Our Honeymoon for your guests. We’ve got some more developments coming that’ll help you as couples with PayPal too. Watch this space!
As always, if you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, either by leaving a comment on this post or by contacting us directly.