Three minor updates

In our efforts to be the UK’s best wedding list service, we’re always keeping an eye open for things we could do better, and making little improvements whenever we can.  This past week, we made three.

Our new system to automatically log PayPal gift payments is working brilliantly, and means that we can now be much more confident that if we don’t have transaction information recorded for a gift, it’s because payment didn’t go through. In turn, this means that the gift reminder emails you can send to guests could state this more clearly.

As before, our reminder emails politely repeat the original confirmation message sent when the guest first reserved the gift from your registry, but they also now state that the transaction has yet to be fully completed.  We’ve also tweaked some of the other wording in both the reminder and original notification emails, together with including our telephone number for queries if you’re based in the UK or EU.

On the subject of wording, we had an email from one of our customers pointing out that the search box on our homepage didn’t use gender-neutral vocabulary in asking for the surname of “either the bride or groom”.  We like to think we’re very careful about this, but sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to spot something we’ve missed.

We’d also had in mind for a while that asking for a wedding date was also too limiting, since a lot of our customers have a destination wedding, with guests attending a big celebration later on.

So, we’ve adjusted the search form to try to address both of these issues. The form can be seen on our main homepage, and is also the focus of the homepages for each of our optional domains, such as our-wedding-list.co.uk. We hope the changes are subtle enough that many people wouldn’t notice!

Finally, we’ve made a small change to the form guests use to reserve gifts from your site. Shortly after we launched, we added in the option for guests to be able to modify the value of their gift. We had three situations in mind where this might be useful:

1. You’ve asked for 2x Spa Treatments (one for you, one for your partner). A guest can now buy you both with a single gift.
2. You’re asking for contributions towards a larger single cost, such as upgrading your air fare to First Class. You can now include the full cost of the item on your list and you guests can contribute whatever gift value they’re most comfortable with.
3. You’ve asked for a pair of cinema tickets. A guest can now add in a little extra to their gift for popcorn and a coke.

The first of these was made redundant in March 2008, when we launched the option whereby you can ask for a specific number of gifts for any item. Then, in February 2009, we added a way of creating items that allow for a completely open contribution. That left only the third situation — and, as it turned out, very few guests ever actually did this.

So we’ve now removed the editable gift value box for most types of gift on the site.  Open contributions, of course, still request a gift value, as does the gift suggestion section at the foot of your registry page.

As always, we’ll keep looking for further improvements and clarifications we can make, and keep you posted right here.  Don’t forget, you can also find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter, for the very latest news!