Our DIY Wedding Website, Part 3: Paypal Honeymoon Registry

Since Mr. Cola and I have lived together longer than we've been dating, we already have a TON of home-stuff. Yeah, so what if a lot of it is from college (aka hand-me-downs and thrift store finds), it's totally useable, and we don't need more stuff to clutter up our already cluttered and messy kitchen.

But as I'm told, people expect, no, NEED wedding registries. Otherwise you could end up with twenty Crystal Bowls of Doom (seriously, the best wedding forum thread ever, if you have the time to read it all, you'll be cracking up laughing!). So we started looking into doing a honeymoon registry instead. We love to travel, and will be spending about $8k on our honeymoon in Kauai, so might as well let people give us "honeymoon memories" as gifts that we'll actually use, instead of junk that we don't need.

However, all of the honeymoon registry sites charge around 7-10% for the service, either to you or the gift giver. Hello? Is that not crazy or what? The websites offset it by claiming it's the same as a gift giver paying tax, but to me it seems pretty silly to charge that much.

Ok, so back to the drawing board, cause there's no way we were going to allow a cheesy site to rip either us or our guests off. But then it occurred to me, what about our DIY wedding website? Why couldn't I just do our own honeymoon registry for free, or close to it, on our own site? So that's exactly what I did!

Enter one of the wonders-that-make-our-online-lives-so-easy: Paypal! You've all seen the simple Paypal shopping carts on ecommerce websites, so that's what I set out to set up. (screenshot from Paypal site)

And it was surprisingly easy, but I did have to e-mail Go Daddy for instructions, here is the info:

To Add Google® or PayPal Services

1. Log in to your WebSite Tonight account.
2. From the Design menu, click Page Designer .
3. If necessary, from the You are editing list, select the page you want to edit.
4. Click the block you want to edit. Blocks are outlined in blue.
5. Position your cursor where you want to add he Google® or PayPal JavaScript code.
6. Go to the Insert tab, from the Extras icon, select Script.
7. In the Enter JavaScript box, enter or paste the JavaScript code you got from the Google® or PayPal service.
8. Click OK.
9. In the Edit Content window, click the HTML tab.
10. Position your cursor where you want to add the HTML code. You should position the cursor beneath the script placeholder image.
11. Enter or paste the Google® or PayPal.
12. Click OK.

To generate the script from Paypal to insert on your page, go here. Click on any picture below for a larger view.

(screenshot from Paypal site)

Just follow the instructions on the site, it's really easy once you are going through the steps, I promise!

Here is what the final product looks like on our website, not bad for the less than 3% Paypal will charge us for credit card payments (and free if your guest pays with their Paypal account):

And this is the text we included at the top of the page explaining our registry:

"Since we've lived together longer than we've been dating, we really don't need much in the way of traditional wedding gifts, so we thought we'd give everyone the opportunity to give us the gift of honeymoon memories. We love traveling so much, it really is the perfect gift!

You can choose to contribute to any of our honeymoon activities below, using secure PayPal checkout. We have chosen to break the total needed down into smaller increments. You do not have to give the whole amount, this is just something we would like to do on our honeymoon and any part given would helpful and greatly appreciated!"

We also did do a small registry for a few home goods, so those who might feel uncomfortable with the non traditional registry would still have an option.

Did you choose a traditional or untraditional wedding registry?