One of the most agonising questions is how much is the right amount to spend on that all important wedding gift, not to mention the shower and engagement gifts.

Well fear not, here’s a Wedding Etiquette Survival Guide that solves all of these vexing conundrums and more.

The handy, easy-to-follow table suggests appropriate amounts to spend on family members, best friends, friends, and, apparently at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, acquaintances and colleagues. One-night-stands don’t get a look in.

The site also provides useful tips regarding other potentially difficult or delicate areas, such as the dreaded gift registry, which can often turn out to be a veritable Venus flytrap of social mores and expectations. Get in early for best pick of the gifts in your price range, the site suggests.

It’s also perfectly acceptable to “group gift” provided you spend the same amount you would have invested individually and that everyone contributes the same amount. Answers to tricky questions like these are worth their weight in kitchen appliances.

Creativity with your gifting also gets a tick. In other words, don’t be afraid to buy those kitsch flying ceramic ducks if the happy couple has a sense of humour that will appreciate it.

Bonus points if the gift is unwrapped in front of everyone else.

Only two weeks after reporting about UK online wedding registry Wrapit coming undone, it was a nasty surprise to hear of another retail wedding company, Confetti, ahem, blowing over, right during the northern hemisphere wedding season…

Confetti was comprised of five retail outlets in Glasgow, Leeds, London, Birmingham and Reading, plus a popular website and from all outward appearances was chugging along just fine.

But on Friday 13th August (appropriately enough), the bottom fell out of the box and the company filed for voluntary administration. The five shops were closed and more than half the company’s employees were made redundant.

In spite of receiving nearly 8 million hits a month and winning the gong for Best Wedding Website at this year’s BT Online Excellence Awards, the website, which is just about all that remains of Confetti, is still all dressed up with nowhere to go, begging for a buyer.

The administrators have been singing the praises of the website, but so far no-one has come forward with that 11th hour reprieve everyone’s been hoping for. D-day is 31 August. After that date, well, the brooms will be out, big time!

When is a wedding gift not a wedding gift? When it’s a bribe…

Or at least, when it’s considered by certain prosecutors to be a bribe. It seems Sweden’s favourite daughter – Crown Princess Victoria – has unwittingly unleashed some legal furies after her recent wedding to her former personal trainer Daniel Westling.

One of the country’s richest men, billionaire Bertil Hult, gifted the happy couple his private jet, yacht and ranch in the US for their honeymoon. Not for keeps mind you, just a generous lend. A bit more exciting and interesting than the traditional crockpot and appliances, but surely there’s nothing wrong with it?

Unfortunately some of Sweden’s leading public prosecutors think there is – and are crying “bribery” all the way to the anti-corruption unit.

The heir to the Swedish crown is accused of giving favourable treatment to Mr Hult’s companies and charitable foundations, presumably instead of just sending him a simple engraved Thank You card for the gifts, which in hindsight would probably have been the most prudent thing to do.

Not surprisingly the scandal has pitted Sweden’s pro and anti-monarchists against each other, dividing the community, but providing the media with enough material to last for quite a while.

The royal couple was followed all the way to a remote South Pacific location by one of Sweden’s trashier tabloids, salivating for more juicy details on the country’s biggest gossip story since the breakup of Abba.

The moral of the story? Not everything is wine and roses when you’re a Princess, and as Victoria has found out, when you’re in the public eye, you come under a lot more scrutiny than the rest of us mortals. And that includes your wedding prezzies.

Still… hunky personal trainer, wedding, South Pacific honeymoon, private jet, yacht and ranch. There are some people it’s just hard to feel sorry for.

When you’re caught up in the flush of romance and celebration, it’s easy to forget that online bridal registries and wedding gift companies can sometimes be as shonky as snakeoil salesmen…

The UK-based online wedding gift company Wrapit, investigated by The Insolvency Service has been found to have been very naughty indeed.

For over seven years the company’s directors made false credit card refunds and managed to rake in over £872,000 from new customers even though it had pretty much been in the red from day one.

By the time it collapsed in August 2008 with debts of over £7 million, it had over 70,000 undelivered wedding gifts and lots of very angry, unhappy bridezillas (sorry, customers).

The Managing Director and Retail Director were disqualified for a total of 15 years, but this would have come too late for the thousands of weddings their unscrupulous activities would have affected.

It’s hard to know what would be worse – a hailstorm on your wedding day, or having your wedding gifts disappear into the great e-never-never.

If you thought the modern singles and dating scene has become increasingly bizarre in western societies with speed-dating and “matchmaking” reality TV shows, spare a thought for the Japanese.

Alarmed by the country’s declining fertility rate and with marriage levels at an all-time low, authorities have been implementing some imaginative measures to encourage young people to feel the lurve again.

Introducing the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, Japan’s first government-organised dating website, a concept that struggles to sound even vaguely romantic.

Fukui is an affluent coastal town about 300km northwest of Tokyo that enjoys the largest proportion of double-income households and lowest unemployment in the country. It also has the lowest marriage and birthrates, leaving local authorities all aflutter at the thought of an ageing population.

Of course, this consternation has nothing to do with tradition, values or even romance – it’s about the economy, stupid. A declining population means a declining tax base. With stakes as high as these, it’s no wonder that couples who agree to marry are then showered with cash or wedding gifts, courtesy of the taxpayer.

And it isn’t just the authorities in Kukui who are sweating over falling birthrates – the Tokyo-based dating service O-Net Inc. has been busy organizing romantic events like singles breakfasts and, er, trash-picking outside busy train stations. Now there’s something to get the heart thumping.

The “elegance seminars” for women are also worth mentioning, although there don’t appear to be any parallel equivalents for men, such as “sharing the housework” or “remembering to put the toilet seat down” seminars.

For those of you who love a good wedding story, here’s a cracker.

A married couple in the UK who wish to remain anonymous, recently discovered that two fairly ordinary looking Chinese vases that were given to them as wedding gifts were, in fact, anything but ordinary.

After sitting on a shelf collecting dust in the couple’s Southampton home, the vases were recently identified as rare 18th century Chinese works dating from the Qianlong dynasty (”the new Ming”, according to an auctioneer). The couple had no idea of the vases’ royal connections until an antiques dealer visited their house and suggested the pieces could be extremely valuable.

He wasn’t kidding. The bewildered couple sold the vases to an overseas bidder for a whopping £500,000. They obviously had no qualms or stabs of sentiment offloading this wedding gift to a complete stranger and making a handsome profit in the process.

It just goes to show that ordinary looking gifts picked up for a few pounds or dollars at the local thrift shop can sometimes prove to be worth more than… well, than the local thrift shop itself.

Oh, and the couple’s wedding was actually 45 years ago! Do you think the vases were unwittingly “regifted” by a broke aristocrat?!

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If a department store wedding registry doesn’t appeal to you, there are many online gift registries you can use.

Broadly, they break into three types of categories:

* cash only (this is the type of registry when you want no gifts but cash because you want to splurge on your honeymoon, pay off your wedding, obtain a deposit for your first home or even pay for renovations)
* cash + gifts (this lets guests choose which they’d rather give you and often straddles experiences such a hot air ballooning)
* gifts only - which are the more traditional type of wedding gift registry your mother used, requesting things like homewares, appliances and furnishings.

I’ve compiled the features and potential costs of 7 Australian online wedding registries – it’s worth doing your homework before you sign up as your gift registry could be worth thousands of dollars worth of gifts and/or cash!

One of the many tasks involved with organising your wedding is setting up the gift registry.

In the Olden Days, you’d just troop off to your local department store where you’d set off to create a new world record in knowledge about dinner sets, thread counts and silverware patterns as you selected your bounty for your future home.

Now of course you can set it up online and save yourself many, many hours traipsing about with a price-checker (sorry, your husband-to-be).

What are some of the things to look for?

1. Prices
Do they charge the bride and groom for setting up a registry? Or the guests? Or both? Is it a percentage per gift, or a flat fee no matter how much people spend?

2. Showroom
Do they have a showroom displaying their goodies in case you need expert advice? Their consultants can let you know if a favourite (old) pattern is about to be discontinued and many cases can get you special deals if you order a sufficient quantity, and in some cases, a lifetime discount for purchasing homewares and appliances through them. If you live outside the capital cities, your next best chance to see products is at a regional bridal fair.

3. Gift-wrapping
Do they offer it? They won’t as there’s no need to if it’s a cash registry. If they’re actual gifts, your guest may get charged a wrapping fee. But you might be surprised at the loss of ceremony and “occasion” in being unable to “unwrap” your gifts.

4. Real or “fake” gifts
Are you selecting, for example 12 x Royal Doulton white china dinner plates that guests can buy per plate for your enjoyment? Or are you providing a picture as an example, but really intending to pocket the cash? Keep in mind that those guests will ask you seemingly ad nauseum about the gifts they thought they bought you – and may even want to see them.

5. Registry expiration
Does your registry close the day of your wedding? A month later? When you’ve reached a cash target? 90 days later? The later it closes, the longer you may have to wait to receive your gifts.

6. Referral program
Do they reward you for referring them to your friends? Wedding registries are worth big bucks.

7.  Delivery
Is there a charge for getting actual gifts delivered? Do they deliver all in one go or can you start receiving them slowly as the items get purchased. Can they hold them while you’re on honeymoon or moving into your new house?

8. Testimonials
Have your friends and family used them? Do they provide names and suburbs of those who have used them? You might want to Google them first to see what comes up if you haven’t heard of them before – don’t forget, they will potentially receive thousands of dollars of your guests’ money and you need to be sure they’re above-board.

Saturn, the planet of maturity and responsibility, entered Libra on 21 July 2010 where he will stay until October 2012.

Libra rules marriage, relationships, fairness, justice and good manners. Over the next two years we will see a huge emphasis on – and return to – courtesy and politeness. Libran Oscar Wilde said, “Manners before morals” suggesting that people will forgive many things if you have good manners!

And this includes the need to acknowledge someone’s gift with a thank you card (or in descending order of charm and effort, a thank you call, email or text).

When someone has gone to the effort of selecting, paying and presenting you with a gift, the very least you can do is acknowledge it. Not being thanked can make you feel used, ripped off and resentful – and very disinclined to make an effort again for that person.

Saturn is the Taskmaster of the Zodiac, a grumpy granddad, stern school principal and demanding boss, all rolled into one. Whatever sign he is he slowly but surely makes it socially inappropriate to act the wrong way (just think of the health “police” over the last couple of years he was in Virgo).

I thought about this when I read a blog post about a woman who was angry that Target had deleted her gift registry 90 days after her wedding, making it hard for her to write her thank you cards 11 MONTHS after getting married. Apparently she hadn’t kept any record of who gave what wedding gift which is just unbelievable.

Instead of getting sympathetic clucks of “you poor old thing”, almost all of the 219 replies absolutely ripped her to shreds for taking a year to thank people saying she was an “idiot”, a “jerk”, “lame”, “lazy” and so on. No-one let her get off the hook for being “too busy”.

There’s a real opportunity for (online) retailers to include a blank Thank You card with the gift so that the recipient can easily write a note of appreciation to their gift-giver. RedEnvelope used to offer this service, then stopped it.

I’d use it – wouldn’t you?