How to Set Up a Baby Shower Registry (The Complete Guide)

1. When to set up your registry

The sweet spot is 4–6 weeks before the shower date — but ideally much earlier. Many parents-to-be set up their registry as soon as they share the news, around the 20-week mark. That gives guests almost three months to browse, which makes a real difference for the bigger purchases.

Three months of lead time is especially useful for expensive items like prams and car seats. You want time to research properly before committing, not add the first option you find the week before the shower. And some popular baby gear sells out — having your registry live early means guests aren't stuck with "out of stock" messages.

2. How many gifts to include

Aim for 1.5 to 2 gifts per guest — the same rule of thumb as a wedding registry. For a shower of 30 guests, that's 45 to 60 items on your list.

Baby registries tend to run larger than wedding registries, and for good reason: there are so many small, inexpensive consumable items. Nappies in multiple sizes, wipes, muslin cloths, onesies in 3-month and 6-month sizes — these are all low-cost but genuinely useful, and they make excellent gifts for guests who prefer to spend under $30.

Including plenty of accessible price points means no guest feels stuck choosing between a car seat they can't afford and nothing. The more variety in your registry, the easier it is for everyone to find something.

3. What to put on your registry

The most useful baby registries are built around the first three months of life — the period when you'll be most overwhelmed and least able to go shopping. Common categories to cover:

• Sleep — bassinet or cot, sleep sacks, swaddle wraps, muslin cloths, baby monitor
• Feeding — breast pump, bottles and teats, nursing pillow, bottle steriliser, high chair (for when they're ready)
• Getting around — pram or stroller, infant car seat, baby carrier or wrap
• Bathing & care — baby bath, soft hooded towels, nappy bag, change mat, nappy bin
• Clothing — onesies and sleepsuits across multiple sizes: newborn, 0–3 months, 3–6 months, 6–12 months. Babies outgrow sizes in weeks, so a stack of newborn-only clothes is less useful than a spread across sizes
• Nappies & consumables — nappies in newborn and size 1, wipes, nappy cream, nappy bags
• Play & development — play mat with arch, soft toys, board books, teethers
• For the parents — a meal delivery gift card, a professional cleaner for a month, a postpartum care hamper. These are often the most appreciated gifts, especially from close friends and family

4. Balancing price ranges

Baby registries naturally skew toward a lot of low-cost items — which is a good thing. A rough split that works well:

Price range	Proportion	Examples
Under $30	~40%	Wipes, onesies, board books, muslins, dummy sets, nappy cream
$30 – $80	~35%	Swaddle sets, bath sets, nursery accessories, baby carriers, sleep sacks
$80 – $200	~15%	Baby monitor, nursing pillow, stroller accessories, bottle steriliser
Over $200	~10%	Pram, car seat, cot, breast pump

The under-$30 tier is more important here than in a wedding registry. Baby showers often include colleagues, neighbours, and more distant relatives who want to give something thoughtful but aren't spending a lot. A registry full of expensive items makes those guests feel awkward — plenty of low-cost options is genuinely welcoming.

5. Which stores to register at

Baby gear is notoriously spread across specialist retailers. The best pram might be from one store, the best nursing pillow from another, nappies from a supermarket, and clothing from somewhere else entirely. Registering at a single department store means you're limited to whatever they happen to stock.

A universal registry solves this. With a universal registry like Gift Registry, you paste a product URL from any store and the details fill in automatically — name, price, image. Your guests see one clean list regardless of where each item comes from. They don't have to navigate between multiple registries or wonder if they've already been bought.

The bookmarklet makes it even easier: install it once in your browser, and you can add gifts to your registry from any shopping site with a single click while you're browsing.

For guests who prefer to shop in person, you can still register at a physical baby store alongside your universal registry. Many parents find a physical store registry works for in-person shoppers, while the universal registry handles everything else.

6. How to share your registry with guests

Baby showers are different from weddings on this point: it is entirely acceptable — expected, even — to include the registry link in the shower invitation. Guests want to know where you're registered before they shop, and including it in the invitation saves everyone the awkward "so where are you registered?" conversation.

Good places to share your registry:

• In the baby shower invitation — include the link or a short URL directly on the invite
• A group message to close family — parents and siblings often want to coordinate on bigger gifts; send them the link early
• Alongside your pregnancy announcement — many parents-to-be post their registry when they share the news publicly
• As a QR code on printed invitations — guests scan it on their phone or hand it to someone who can shop for them

Gift Registry generates a QR code for every registry automatically. You can download it and drop it straight into a printed invitation design.

7. Keeping every gift a surprise

The classic problem with registries is that parents often know exactly what's coming before the shower. Once you can see that the pram has been claimed, you spend weeks knowing who bought it — and trying not to let on that you know.

Gift Registry is built around anonymous claiming. When a guest claims a gift, it's marked as taken so nobody doubles up — but you never see who claimed what. You know the pram has been claimed. You don't know if it was your mum or your best friend until the day. That keeps the unwrapping genuinely exciting.

It also avoids a subtler awkwardness: if you know who gave you what before the shower, it's easy to accidentally let it slip or to treat certain guests differently. Anonymous claiming keeps things natural.

8. After the baby arrives: marking received and thank-you notes

Once gifts start arriving — before the shower, at the shower, and sometimes in the weeks after the birth — use the post-event view to mark each item as received and send thank-you notes directly from the registry. Everything is in one place; you're not cross-referencing a notebook with your registry list.

The convention for baby shower thank-you notes is to send them within two to four weeks of the shower. For gifts that arrive after the birth, aim to send the note within a month.