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Editor's note: Buy Buy Baby’s parent company, Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 23, 2023. All stores will close by June 30, 2023. If you already have a Buy Buy Baby registry, learn more about what the closure means for you. Need help switching your registry? Take a quiz to be matched to the best baby registry for your needs.
Going from having zero baby gear to being fully equipped to take a tiny baby home from the hospital can be quite the leap. Luckily, you have nine months to prepare (mentally, too) and stock up on everything you could possibly need — and What to Expect's Baby Registry Builder makes it easy to get started. All you do is answer a few quick questions, and we'll recommend the best registries and baby products for you.
Don't feel like taking a quiz right now? A Buy Buy Baby registry could be for you. It takes away some of the stress by focusing solely on baby-related stuff, so you won’t get distracted while you're building your registry. Plus, it tries to make the baby registry process even more attractive by throwing in discounts, coupons and samples. Gotta love that!
Free Shipping Rewards Program: If you (and friends and family) have purchased at least $1,500 worth of gifts by the time your due date arrives, you get unlimited free shipping for your baby’s first year. You can start using it after baby's arrival date, just in case you realize you're missing something important after bringing your little home.
Completion discount: Within six weeks before your due date, Buy Buy Baby sends you a coupon for 15 percent off everything left on your registry.
Welcome box: Buy Buy Baby gives you a mix of samples and coupons in their Welcome Box, which you can purchase for $10 and have shipped to your house or pick up in stores, pending availability. Within seven days of your Welcome Box being shipped or purchased in-store, $10 in rewards will be applied to your Buy Buy Baby account. You must, however, have a Buy Buy Baby Registry to receive that perk.
Price match: Show a competitor’s price for an identical item and Buy Buy Baby will match it in stores or over the phone.
Group gifting: Baby products that are $100 or more will automatically be eligible for the online-only group gifting feature. Your friends and family can choose how much they want to contribute, and this amount is converted into credits in your "My Funds" section. From there, you can decide which product to use those credits on.
To create your registry, you will need the usual information: your name, address, email, a password and due date. Once you’ve plugged everything in, you can start adding items to your registry. Search around the site if you already know what you want or use the registry checklist to make sure you’ve covered the essentials.
Once we signed up, Buy Buy Baby sent us to our registry’s main page where we could add items and get suggestions. A window pops up that lets you explore their collections, like "baby on budget" or "city baby." There’s also an “analyze your registry” button that breaks down the gifts by price range — from “under $25” to “$300+” — with a recommended number of items that fall into each range. If you completely follow the button’s advice, you’ll end up with 100 items on your list, but it's a helpful starting point if you haven't started looking at baby gear yet.
There’s also a baby checklist that gives you the “essentials” in product categories like nursing, bathing, toys and more. Things automatically get checked off the list if in their respective categories as you add iterms to your registry. And did we mention there’s a thank you list, too? It's a lot of lists, which might be helpful if that's what keeps you organized. If not, it might stress you out more to see all of these suggestions in so many different places.
Even though we aren’t raving about the registry’s design, we appreciate Buy Buy Baby’s selection. It has all the major brands and covers every kind of product you could need. Adding an item is a breeze, too.
It doesn’t matter if you bought a product online or in person; both can be returned easily within a year of the purchase date. While Buy Buy Baby has allowed you to ship returns previously, the retailer is currently only accepting returns in stores open to the public.
To return something in person, just bring in your item and the gift receipt to exchange it or get a credit. (Note that you'll also need to bring a government-issued photo ID if you're getting a credit.) If you don’t have a receipt, an employee can look up your registry or order number to find the product. And what if you don’t have a receipt and your gift wasn’t purchased from your registry? You may still be able to return it for 80 percent of the item's value.
Pros
Cons
Buy Buy Baby is the kind of brand you think of when envisioning a traditional baby registry. It’s solely baby focused and has a huge selection of products to get you started with parenthood. The store is big on coupons (and sometimes accepts expired ones!), which we love, and it offers parents benefits like a 15 percent completion discount, free in-store or virtual registry consultation, and easy returns.
However, some of Buy Buy Baby’s perks involve actually stepping foot inside a store. There’s only one problem with that: Buy Buy Baby only has 135 stores around the country. To take full advantage of your registry, you need to be near one of those locations.
And when it comes to coupons, be sure to read the fine print, since Buy Buy Baby limits which brands qualify for them. For example, the popular brand Uppababy is on the exclusion list. If you're hoping to use a coupon to save on the big ticket items, do your research to make sure your desired stroller, car seat or crib is eligible.
Buy Buy Baby’s shipping process also fall a little short compared to other registries. You qualify for free shipping on orders over $39. When you think about Amazon Prime’s free two-day shipping, Buy Buy Baby’s $39 order total seems steep.
We don’t suggest using Buy Buy Baby as your only registry, but it could be good to use in combination with another one. There are some good benefits — like the completion discount, coupons and free shipping rewards — but they aren’t better than some of your other registry options (like Amazon or Target).
What Buy Buy Baby does have is a pretty good selection of brands and competitive prices, which is why it would be great as your secondary registry.
Maybe you’ve decided you want to start reading more, but you don’t know where to start. Perhaps you’ve always been a self-identified bookworm, but you’re having trouble finding books outside your go-to genres. Or maybe you’ve got your own reading situation under control, but picking out titles for your kids has you scratching your head. Signing up for a monthly book subscription box could be the simple answer to all of your literary conundrums.
Subscribing to a book box is a great way to recalibrate how you think about reading. Instead of spending time researching the newest releases or trying to pick just one from the many titles that catch your interest, you can sign up for a book box and pay someone else to do that for you. Usually curated by booksellers, with the help of industry experts and librarians, these monthly boxes arrive on your doorstep filled with an array of books picked from the genres you love. “There are so many books being published every day, so having an expert or group of experts pick the best of the best for you can be really handy if you’re overwhelmed by choosing on your own,” said Janssen Bradshaw, a former elementary school librarian and current book blogger. “Also, if you’re looking to build your home library at a steady pace, a book subscription is a very simple way to do it without a huge one-time cost.” Usually, the books you receive will be a surprise—that’s part of the fun. But if you’d rather know what you’re getting, there are boxes that give you the control.
Book boxes can be a great way to get your kids excited about reading, too. “Some children develop a dislike for reading due to equating it to homework,” said Alia Jones, a Cincinnati-based children’s library service assistant and book blogger. “[I]f a child knows that they have one or two books coming in every month, in a fun package addressed to them, that’s something to celebrate!”
Usually, the books you receive will be a surprise—that’s part of the fun. But if you’d rather know what you’re getting, there are boxes that give you the control.
Finding the right book subscription can be tricky, though, if you’re looking for inclusive books written by authors with diverse backgrounds. “It’s enriching for readers of all ages to read a variety of books because it encourages them to think beyond their own worldview,” said Alaina Lavoie, communications manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in children’s literature and publishing. “Reading stories about people whose lived experiences differ from theirs opens people up to empathize and gain a deeper understanding.” One of the things to keep in mind when you’re vetting a service with diversity in mind is to ask yourself who is curating the monthly picks. “I’d recommend looking at who started the box and who’s running it now,” Lavoie added. “Is a committee choosing the books? Is it everyone on staff? Or is it just one person who founded the box? The more people that you have involved—and the more diverse and varied that group is—the more you’re going to get that same diverse selection in the books that they’re choosing.”
To help you navigate the many book boxes available, we asked Jones, Lavoie, and Bradshaw—as well as Illinois-based librarian Melissa Martinez—to tell us, based on their own experiences working with readers, what’s most important when you’re vetting these services. The most crucial thing to keep in mind is that book boxes are not one-size-fits-all; what works well for you might be another reader’s nightmare, so there’s no way to definitively say one book box is better than another. For instance, Martinez said her ideal book box would allow for customization, but she knows that some folks subscribe to them specifically to be surprised.
One of the things to keep in mind when you’re vetting a service with diversity in mind is to ask yourself who is curating the monthly picks.
Our experts’ advice boiled down to three key standards that all book boxes should meet: They should include titles written by authors with diverse backgrounds; the books should be selected by a group rather than one person, in order to ensure a variety of perspectives; and, ideally, they should help you save money over time. We also took a close look at return policies, subscriber reviews, delivery costs, and subscription model types as we made our assessments. Using our experts’ advice and what we learned from our own deep-dive research, we’ve pulled together a list of different subscription services that we think will appeal to most people, no matter your reading style.
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