Wedding gift spending

Earlier this week, our friends at men’s wedding magazine Staggered unearthed some research showing that wedding guests are, on average, spending less on wedding gifts now than they had in 2008. The research claimed that guests are spending £28.26 now, compared to £42.91 two years ago — a dramatic cut of 34%.

This prompted us to check our database. Were our couples being given more back when we started than they are now? Or does our wedding list service buck the national trend?

We decided to check only the value of gifts that we knew had been paid to couples through PayPal, excluding cash gifts altogether.  Although many of our customers choose not to collect their gifts online using a PayPal account, including these gifts would make it harder for us to know which gifts were paid and which were tests of the system that hadn’t been deleted from a couple’s Gift History. We felt, therefore, we’d get a more accurately representative sample by focussing only on those gifts we knew to have been paid online.

For gifts paid in British pounds, the average gift value bought on our site in 2008 was £43.13, which rose in 2009 to £45.27, and has risen again this year to £47.47.

Similarly, the average US dollar gift was $80.23 in 2008, which fell to $78.52 in 2009, but has leaped back to a brilliant $86.02 this year.

And since going live in 2007, we’ve had gifts paid in 11 different currencies. The stats show that 2009 was a bumper year for the Euro (with gifts averaging €97.77), and only gifts paid in Canadian dollars are of a lower average value this year than last.

So we’re very pleased to note that, contrary to the general trend elsewhere, guests using buy-our-honeymoon.com are even more generous now than two years ago — and they’ve always been more generous than the national average!

For help with making your honeymoon wishlist as fun for your guests as it is for you, check out our ten top tips on how to make the most of your wedding gift list.