JoyReviews of withjoy.com

Frustrating, slow to load, poor user interface, couldn’t fix registry. Lots of frustration. Would not recommend

Their RSVP/Guest list experience is extremely laggy. The page to update contacts takes a while to load, so it makes adding guests tedious. Additionally, the RSVP customization capabilities are limited. For example, we are including children in our guest count, however, there is not way to distinguish children from adult guests or identify which children need meals or not. I now have to reach out to each guest individually to ask whether children will need meals or not. Wish I had researched better before picking this site.

The RSVP tool is not a great multi person reservation system per household and multiple guests told me they had issues RSVPing. Other parts of the website were fair for the set-up of the details. The templates were nice and easy to customize for the website itself. The registry doesn't update to external websites very well if you happen to update your registry on those external sites like Amazon or Crate & Barrel. Had to remove the registry multiple times when changes were made and the changes were not dynamic. I would not recommend this to future couples.

Joy as a platform seems like it should be good, but there are a lot of back-end issues and process that are not user-friendly. We have had multiple issues with emails not displaying in the way it says (eg, coming from 'Joy' instead of the couple's name when that was specifically set up before spending). The process for sending out virtual save the dates and invites is also not particularly user-friendly, and there's a lack of clarity about what recipients will receive in the body of an email vs a separate thing that they have to click into. Furthermore, there were issues with version control of saved templates and customized physical invitations that caused headaches; this led to a major issue with attempts at physical invitations that ended up wasting a lot of our time.

Out of 10 gifts purchased so far, 3 gifts have been out of stock. Its frustrating that we spent time creating a registry just to get “credit” instead of the items we selected. It will be more work for us later on to find those same items elsewhere.

The website back end is not great. There is no way to easily see who rsvp'd and who didn't...you have to go to the manage guest list page and scroll over. And we have found that this isn't updating with people's responses consistently. Maddening. I find the site not intuitive or well designed for what we expect. There must be better options out there.

Designing the website was frustrating. We typed in our information, and then wanted to use the “design” feature. It did not transfer smoothly to a different layout, so we wanted to go back, but the website wouldn’t let us revert it to the original layout. We like how our website turned out in the end, but we spent much longer than we had hoped to making it because the user interface was not very intuitive. I’m glad that it was free.

We were disappointed with Joy and regret not going with a traditional registry instead. We developed a small registry with just the important items (pots and pans, towels and sheets). These simples were not available AFTER our guests purchased them, and we were only able to get “Joy credit”, not a refund. This limited our ability to get the items we actually wanted. This seemed to defeat the purpose of a small registry of just the items we felt most practical and appropriate to ask for from our guests.