Weddingbee boards

"Best"?  Well I guess it depends on what you want, and if you think your guests would prefer a brick and mortar store, or an online store.  Someone who is starting a new household would probably want different things from people who have been living together for a while.

(And um, are you doing marketing research?  "Onlinelabelscom"?  I don't mind helping out, but it would be better to be straightforward about surveying people.)

Ah, gotcha.  Well, for household type things, popular ones include Macy's, Crate&Barrel, Target, BedBath&Beyond, Willams Sonoma.  Those are probably the biggest ones (at least off the top of my head). 

 Less likely to be amenable to wedding-related advertising, but maybe worth checking out: REI, Lowe's, VivaTerra.

 And maybe take a look at the links to wedding blogs.  People who blog are often looking for advertisers to support their site.

 Hope that helps, and good luck with work and wedding!

My married friends all raved about their Crate & Barrel registries.  Their online store is fabulous and they have many brick and mortar stores too.

Target is very popular too, and more budget friendly than C&B, but I've heard that they require a receipt to return wedding gifts, which guests don't always include.  My friend who registered there also mentioned that they were *really* slow to update the registry to reflect purchases, which meant that she and her husband ended up with a lot of duplicates.

In the "bad" column, I just had a really obnoxious experience with a close friend's Macy's registry.  Two months after I placed the order and got a confirmation (and a week after the bride had received a note saying my gift was being shipped!) they sent me an e-mail saying that my order had been cancelled.  No explanation, just "your order has been cancelled." 

Of course, I wanted to know what happened, so I contacted Customer Service.  It took them over a week to get back to me.  They claimed my credit card had been declined, but my credit card company said that there was no record of a Macy's attempt to charge me and that there was no reason my card should have been declined.  According to my friend, other guests at this wedding had problems with their Macy's registry too.  I definitely won't be registering there!

We loved our registries at Macy's and Bed, Bath and Beyond. Williams-Sonoma was great too. I would really encourage you to avoid Target. They have good prices and a good selection but a really, really bad return policy. It just is not worth the hassle with all the other options you have. Enjoy!

Target will take returns without a receipt as long as whatever item it is shows as purchased on your gift purchase log. If you go to the registry kiosks at Target, you can search your registry, sign in on it and print one as you're waiting at the return counter. You're out of luck if it's an off-registry item from Target (if it's without a receipt you wouldn't know, though). As always, within 90 days.

FI and I registered at Target and Bed Bath and Beyond -- we are very low budget and most guests are low budget too, so we wanted to stay away from Macy's and Williams-Sonoma. Other considerations for us were a good completion program (JCPenney has a good one, but we didn't want to go the department store route), and a nationwide chain, as the majority of our family is from the Midwest but we are getting married in the South.