8 Money-Saving Registry Hacks To Help You Maximize Deal Days All Year
Your Babylist registry isn’t a one-trick pony! Use it to prep, organize, and save during sales events.
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When you’re prepping for your baby’s arrival, your registry acts as a North Star of sorts, keeping you on track as you weed through the sometimes overwhelming world of baby gear and parenting products. But did you know that your Babylist registry can also guide you through a thicket of sales events—from the heavy hitters like Prime Day and Black Friday to the deal days we wait for all year like the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale and Target Car Seat Trade-In Event?
As a commerce writer and editor with six years of experience, I’ve spent a chunk of my career covering sales events and sniffing out deals, including the weekly curation of the deals in our weekly sales and deals article series. Along the way, I’ve collected a few insider savings tips, tricks and hacks. As a mom of two who considers Prime Day to be in her top five favorite holidays, I know firsthand about the sales shopping experience—like knowing when to jump on a discount for a product that rarely goes on sale and how to figure out if you’re actually saving money. To round out the information in this guide, I also reached out to savings experts for even more tips on how to save the most during a sale.
Use these tips and tricks to save, prep, and plan for the next sale with your Babylist Registry.
1. Use Babylist to compare prices on one page
Babylist is a universal registry, which means you can add any product from any retailer. When you add a product to your registry, the prices and links to the other retailers that sell that same product will show up. This allows you to quickly and accurately compare prices without leaving your registry or clicking around to a bunch of sites to confirm if a product is actually on sale.
This hack is useful any time of the year, but it's especially effective during big sales events like Black Friday when there’s an influx of deals coming at you from all directions. Babylist Shop items will show the sale price with the regular price crossed out and the percent you’re saving (doing all of the savings calculations for you). And for other retailers, you’ll be able to see the new price within your registry across retailers. Your registry price comparison tool can help you parse through the price of items across retailers easily.
2. Use Price Comparison For Prime Day, Specifically
This hack comes from TikTok creator Shannon Willett (@parentingproductsguru) and when I saw it, I knew it deserved a spot in this guide. Prime Day is a great time to find deals on your registry items but it can be a pain to manually search for each item (especially if you haven’t shared your registry with anyone yet). To get started, open your registry and open Guest View. In the top right corner, click on the menu titled stores and select the button for Amazon. This will highlight the items that are available to purchase on Amazon. From there, you’ll be able to view the price of an item on Amazon and other retailers and be able to figure out if it’s actually on sale for Prime Day. While this creator shows this hack being used for Prime Day deals, you can actually use it for any retailer-specific sales event like the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale or Target Deal Days (just change the retailer in the drop-down menu).
3. Hack your registry categories
If you’ve already built your registry, then you’re well aware of how useful Babylist categories are. You can drop your baby essentials into neat, organized groups to make the shopping experience seamless for both you and your support system.
And when you’re ready to prep for a sale event, you can create custom categories to help prioritize what you’ll want to focus on scoring during a sale. For example, if you still need a few essentials for your nursery and Black Friday is coming up, you can create a category titled “Nursery Sale List” and load it with whatever you need—like a glider, crib sheets or changing pad.
When the sale event rolls around, you can hop into that pre-set category and easily click through the things you want for your nursery and see if they’re on sale. Plus, if your friends and family are still buying gifts from your registry, they can use your custom category to shop for your gift at a discount during a sales event. Honestly, it’s a win-win for everyone.
4. Keep using your registry, even after the baby is here
Even after your baby shower is over and you’ve welcomed your little one, you’ll likely notice that you still need things for your baby (I bought an Owlet and about five different swaddles before I even left the hospital). You can switch your Babylist registry to private mode and use it as a running list of things you need, want to try, and are considering buying. When a big sale rolls around, you can use your private registry in two different ways: You can use it as your personal shopping hub, checking things off as you snag a deal (either during a single sale or over the year as you take advantage of different sales) or you can refer to your private registry during a sales event to quickly check if the things you still need are on sale at any retailer online. If you want to keep your registry live while still utilizing a private running list, you can build a Babylist wishlist, set it to private, and add all of the things you want to keep an eye on during a sale event.
5. Sign up for price drop alerts
Outside of big sales events, retailers quietly drop prices on products almost daily—but it’d be a full-time job trying to track down these random dips. Babylist registry to the rescue! When you create your registry, you can go into your settings and click the box “Price and Stock Changes” to be notified when a price drops (or increases) on one of the products you registered for (as long as your registry has been active in the last 60 days). So when Prime Day or Cyber Monday comes around, an alert will hit your inbox, letting you know that the thing you’ve been eyeing has had a price cut.
6. Use your 15 percent completion discount
About two months before your expected arrival date, a 15 percent off coupon will be added to your account (so be sure to add your expected arrival date to your profile). You can apply this discount to almost anything in the Babylist Shop and it is valid for up to six months—which means you can scoop up things you’re missing (especially big ticket items like a top-rated stroller), want to try or need for your soon-to-be toddler. Be sure to check out all of the details and exclusions for the 15 percent completion discount before applying it.
7. Demystify discounts
Whether you’re eyeing a big ticket item like a popular travel system or a handful of smaller products, Joanie Demer, co-founder and co-CEO of The Krazy Coupon Lady says that one of the most important steps you want to take before a sales event is to research. “During Prime Day and Black Friday, I would advise using CamelCamelCamel—a free service that tracks Amazon prices—so you can see the price history of any item. You can see when the product was at its lowest price, and then set an alert for that exact price drop,” Demer tells us.
8. Follow the Babylist Weekly Sales and Deals series
Less of a hack and more of an evergreen savings tip: check out our weekly sales and deals roundup of the best baby and parenting (and generally really good) deals happening around the internet. As Babylist’s resident sales and deals editor, I spend a good chunk of my time searching for irresistible deals (the kind that’ll make you want to share in the group chat) and rounding them up in an easy-to-read, shoppable article. While you can buy directly from our weekly sales guide, you can also add products to your registry while they're on sale so your friends and family can grab them at a discount. And during major sales events like Prime Day, Presidents’ Day, Black Friday and all of the others in between (yes, that includes Nordstrom Anniversary Sale), we have special installments to focus on just those deals.
Bonus: Clean up your registry by marking gifts as purchased
Your baby registry should be a live list of everything you need. So if you’ve shared the registry and your friends and family have started to purchase gifts, you want to make sure your registry reflects what you’ve received. And since Babylist is a universal registry, your friends and family can come back to check off the gifts they’ve purchased too. This way, when a sale event is happening, you’ll know that your registry is an up-to-date reflection of everything you still need to purchase instead of a mishmash of gifts, self-bought products and items you still need.
