- Are you fed up with receiving gifts you didn't want and not getting the things you do?
- Are you fed up with the big chain stores making a fortune from wedding lists
- Do you instantly forget all the things you want when someone asks what they should get you?
- Do you sometimes need to get something for someone special but you can't remember what they want?
That's why I wrote this site! With WhatToGive you can create a list of things you want that other people can look at. These could be specific items from specific shops ("a luxury leather golf ball holster") or just a general preference ("any white wine is good - preferably dry"). Other people can then visit the site to look at your list.
You're not tied to having items from just one shop or just one website - you just describe what you want!
YES! I am confident that WhatToGive has all you need to manage your wedding list. Once you have listed all the things you want, the site will track who has promised to get what. You won't be tied in to using any particular shop. You can list items that are available online or from ordinary shops. You can easily send an email to all your friends telling them where to find your list.
If you think there is anything we have missed just tell me using the feedback form and I'll do my best to add it in.
The main thing is that WhatToGive is designed to be simple and easy to use. The signup is quick - literally just type in your email address or mobile number and you've got yourself an online gift list! Special features include:
- Quickly invite friends to look at your list. Just click on the "Invite" link when you're logged in and type or paste their email addresses into the box. You'll be able to preview and change the invite email before it is sent.
- Items are removed from your list as people promise to get them unless you want as many as possible of that particular item. If you don't believe a promise you can cancel it and the item it will reappear on your list!
I still think you'll find WhatToGive useful! Here are a few points to consider
- Just list your preferences - Because your WTG list is so flexible you don't have to list actual items - you could just list things you like e.g. anything in red, or anything to do with squirrels. You can of course mix general preferences with specific items on your list.
- On the "my settings" page you can choose to switch off email alerts so that you don't get an email when people promise items from your list.
- Normally when someone has promised to get you something this is shown when you log in to your list. You can also use the options on the "my settings" page to switch this off too so there won't be any clue as to which items on your list have been promised.
YES! Just log in as an existing user on the front page with email address "demo@whattogive.com" and password "demo". Feel free to add and edit items - just please don't change the password or delete more items than you create!
However, you can sign up without providing any personal details or even an email address so its just as quick to create your own account.
There is no time limit on lists. Your list will only be deleted if you delete it yourself or if you ask us to delete your account. We hope you'll like WhatToGive so much that you will use it year after year for Birthdays and Christmases.
The site is geared around either email address or name. Anyone that knows your name or email address (depending on whether you have allowed your list to be found by name alone) will be able to see your list (as long as they know the answer to the optional security question - see below). Anyone in the world can view your list but only if they know the necessary details.
Just to make sure they know about your list though, once you are logged in, you can send your friends an email to let them know that you have a gift list.
WhatToGive isn't a shop! it doesn't sell anything. It is just a place where you list things you want. This means that it never takes any money from you or your friends. It also means that how things are delivered is up to you and your friends. There are a couple of places where you can tell friends how you would like them to get stuff to you. You can either say something in the "welcome message" which appears at the top of your list when friends view is (this can be set up on the "My Settings" page). Alternatively you can make some reference to how you would like to receive the item when adding it to your list in the individual item description.
YES! Its simple - when you are logged in take a look at the very bottom of the "My Friends" page. There you will find details of how to add a special link to your web site. This link will automatically take people straight to your list without having to type in your email address.
In the same way that they find yours - i.e. you search using either their name or email address. If you know these details then you can find their list.
You can choose up to three optional security questions - if you have set some up, anyone wanting to view your list must answer the questions correctly.
Its free! Writing code to charge people money is too hard! If enough people use the site then I will probably try adding a few small Google adverts and see if I can make a bit of money that way!
Without this you would have to choose a username and give this to your friends if you wanted them to be able to view your list. Most people have an email address and most people know their friends' email addresses. People who are not your friends are unlikely to know these. By using email address we can allow others to see your list being fairly sure that they know you.
When others view your list they get an "I'll get this" button next to each item. If they click this they are given the option of filling in their email address and message. If you have indicated that for that particular item you only want one, then as soon as someone promises to get it, it will not be shown to anyone else. When you view your list you can see which items have been promised. Viewing the details for each item will show you who promised the item and when and any message they left. If you don't belive any promise you can cancel it and if the item had been removed from your list it will automatically be added back on.
As mentioned in the answer above if you select the "just one" option when adding an item to your list then that item is not shown to anyone else once someone has clicked the "I'll Get This" button.
At the end of the day a wish list is a list and unless we dot the things all over the screen at random it will _always_ have an order. We feel that the best thing to do is give the list owner complete control over that order. We know that some other gift lists allow you to group things into high/medium/low desirability. You can acheive the same effect with WhatToGive. Here are some tips you might find useful:
- Multiple item manipulation
Using the drop down on the left next it each item in your list is great if you want to move one item to a different position on your list but its not suitable if you have a whole bunch of items that you want to move to the top or bottom of your list. That's why we added the option to carry out operations on multiple items. If you look at the righthand column when viewing your list there is a checkbox next to each item. At the very bottom of the list there is then a dropdown where you can choose an action to perform on all the items that you ticked. These actions include 'move to top of list' and 'move to bottom of list'. You can also use this to quickly move a large number of items onto a different sub-list (see below).
- Dividers
Because WhatToGive doesn't place any restrictions on what you add you can add a dummy item with a title and no other details. If you set the title to 'ITEMS BELOW ARE MY TOP PRIORITY ITEMS' then this will appear on your list amongst the other items - by adding a couple of these dividers and moving them to the correct position on your list you can provide hints to your friends about how much you want each item. It is still possible that some friends might try to 'promise' the divider items - however if you set these to 'as many as possible' then they'll never disappear from your list even after they're promised. An alternative approach is to tell the system that you want 'just one' and then after you have added them go in and promise them yourself (you can do this by clicking on the edit item button after you have added it, then click 'promise item'). That way they will still appear on your list but they will be greyed out and noone will be able to promise them.
- Welcome message
You can customise your welcome message to help explain to friends viewing your list which things you want most - you could combine this with the dividers idea above. e.g. Please find below a list of things I'd like. I've broken the list down into 3 sections 'must have', 'quite like' and 'just for fun'. I have added dividers between each group of items.
- Use sub-lists
You can create as many separate lists under your account as you like. You could create 3 separate lists called 'Must have', 'nice to have' etc. Then you can move the corresponding item onto the corresponding list. You can use the multiple item manipulation functionality described in (1) to acheive this. You can also set a different welcome message on each message to explain to your friends what each list is for.
At the moment you can't upload your own pictures to WhatToGive - you can only include pictures that come from another web site. This is on my to-do list however in the mean time you can put your pictures onto a free picture sharing website and point WhatToGive at that!
Don't worry if the page where the picture lives is not actually the page you want your item to link to. You can put the web address of the page with the image in first. WhatToGive will then grab the picture from there. Once you have the picture you can change the URL - this will not change the picture you have chosen. Hey presto you have a picture from one page and a link from another!
I reccommend www.flickr.com its very good and its free! If you sign up you can upload your photos - You should make sure that you choose for the pictures to be "public" when you upload them otherwise WhatToGive won't be able to find them! Once uploaded you will find each photo has a page of its own - you can then cut-and-paste the address of this page into the WhatToGive "Web address" box when adding your item in WhatToGive. This will then retreive the picture from Flickr. You can either leave this link in place - this will allow your friends to click on the image in your WhatToGive list to see a bigger version. Or you can delete the link address once WhatToGive has found the picture - the picture will remain even if the "Web address" box is empty.
Yes! WhatToGive is ideal for honeymoon lists. You can split your honeymoon into different parts (flights, hotel nights, meals etc.) and friends can then choose to contribute towards specific elements of your trip. You can also add extra honeymoon related items, such as luggage, camera accessories, flip-flops! If some guests might still want to buy something more conventional you can have a list of household goods and a honeymoon list both under the same account.
It's up to you how you choose for your guests to get their gifts to you. They can either send or give you a cheque; pay money directly into an account you specify; or use PayPal to give you the money (see "How do I use PayPal to collect cash gifts from friends" below). Whichever approach you choose you can explain what your friends should do in the customisable welcome text which you can edit at the top of your list.
Unlike other Honeymoon wedding list sites, WhatToGive doesn't charge you or your guests anything. Whatever method you choose for payment the money is transferred from them to you without going through WhatToGive.
WhatToGive has the ability to automatically send your friends to PayPal when they go to "promise" an item on your list. Your friends then complete the transaction on PayPal before being returned to WhatToGive. So all the financial stuff happens on PayPal and is totally independent of WTG. We don't take a cut or have any other involvement with this.
Now... you need to know about how PayPal works. At the moment they have three account types: Personal, Premier and Business. Personal account can only accept PayPal payments - so if you had a personal account your guests would all have to create their own PayPal accounts. However, if you go for the premier account your guests can pay by Credit or Debit cards. The Business account has extra features you probably won't need/want.
PayPal do charge for accepting credit/debig card payments. The charge is currently 20p per transaction as well as up to 4% of the value. However other sites charge between 7% and 9% so I think PayPal is about the cheapest option. Another advantage of PayPal is that they are a well known and stable firm whereas there have been some scare stories in the last few years about smaller wedding list firms going bust and taking people's money with them
To get your own PayPal Premier account click here
For more info. on PayPal's charges go to https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-pop-fees-outside
If you want to set this up for your WhatToGive account then all you need to do is log in to your WhatToGive account and tick one of the "Friends can promise via PayPal" or "Friends must promise via PayPal" on the "Settings" page. The site will then use your "primary" email address when it passes your friends to PayPal for them to make their contribution. If you signed up for WhatToGive with a different email address to your PayPal account then you will have to add the other email address to your WhatToGive account first - you do this in the "settings" page too. WhatToGive will send an email to this new address for you to confirm that it really is your address. Once you have confirmed it you can then go back to the settings page and make this your primary address so that this address is used when your friends give using PayPal.
The system uses the currency of the items on your list as the currency which is passed to PayPal. If you have not added currencies against any of your items then we will not pass a currency to PayPal and it will default to using dollars. To change this simply add a currency as well as a price to at least one of the items on your list.
If you don't want to have a price against the item but you do need to change the currency then simply add a price (including a currency), save the change to the item, then immediately edit the item and remove both the price and the currency. The system will remember the currency even though neither the currency nor the price are displayed any more.
This isn't asked very frequently but we thought we would put it in here anyway!! All you have to do is send an email to support@whattogive.com saying "please delete my account". We will delete your account - usually within 3 days of getting your mail - and reply to let you know that your account has been deleted. This email will have to come from the address you signed up with.
You can't upload your own pictures of items on your list. However if you enter a web address for the item the system will go off and find the best picture from that page. If it gets the wrong image you can choose from all the images on the page. Here's what you do. If you leave the web address in place then the item will be linked through to this page. However if you take the web address away the image will remain but the item will not be linked to this page. This means you can use pictures from just about any web page - and you can usually find a picture to match your item out there somewhere!! Of course you can always upload your photos to a picture sharing website such as flickr.com and then set the web address to be the page with your photo on. Here are the steps you need to take to attach a picture to an item...
- Click "more info" next to the item you want to add an image for
- In another browser window go to Google and do an image search to find an appropriate image for the item
- Click on the image in Google image search
- At the top of the page it will say "Below is the image in its original context on the page: www.webpage.com/page"
- Right click on the address of the page containing the image and choose "Copy Shortcut" (for IE) or "Copy Link Location (for FireFox)
- Come back to WhatToGive and paste this address into the web address box - It doesn't matter if this isn't exactly the right page as it will only be used for the image - the item will not link to this page - in fact you can even substitute a more accurate link once you have grabbed the image
- Click into the "Item title" box and you should see the text "Loading Item Data" appear
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