By Julie Fishman-Lapin
Staff Writer

March 25, 2006

Anyone on a budget who has a wedding to go to knows the frustration of clicking on the bride and groom's online gift registry to find that all the $25 bath towels and $50 wine glasses have already been purchased.

The only remaining items cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

So what's a good wedding guest to do when saddled with a high-priced wish list? Stamford-based Felicite.com has a solution.

Best known for its own online gift registry site, Felicite.com recently received a U.S. patent for its technology that enables gift givers to make partial monetary contributions toward higher-priced items.

With gift registries, the less expensive choices go rather quickly, said Peter DiSalvo, Felicite.com's vice president of marketing. The average gift giver spends between $50 and $100. Felicite.com's idea was to find a way that a group of friends or family could individually contribute a portion to the bigger-ticket items.

The system, which Felicite.com uses on its Web site, automatically updates and keeps track of contributions.

Once the item price has been covered by contributions, an order goes out to the merchant.

This way, DiSalvo said, group of friends can get together and buy the couple that $3,000 plasma television. The partial-purchase technology also makes it possible for a wedding or baby shower guest to contribute a portion of a gift's cost without having to coordinate with others.

"Right now we are talking to some of the bigger stores about licensing this," DiSalvo said. "It would be great for a company that has a gift registry of high-ticket items."

The online gift registry industry is growing fast. In the wedding market alone, people spend $19 billion a year through online gift registries, according to The Knot.com, a leading wedding resource for brides and grooms.

That number doesn't include baby and honeymoon registries, which are becoming increasingly popular.

"Gift registries have become the expected norm," said Jim Okamura, a senior partner with J.C. Williams Group, a Chicago-based retail consultancy. "It's one of the best-practice tools any size retailer can tap into."

Most big retailers make gift registries available to customers, and smaller independent stores and chains are increasingly using the technology, Okamura said.

"They have to. Customers expect it now," he said.

Obtaining a patent for the partial payment technology was a seven-year process, DiSalvo said.

Felicite.com was founded by Hans Xu in Greenwich seven years ago. The company, which has since moved to Stamford, provides a unique gift registry service that allows people to register gifts from any store, for any occasion.

Felicite collects and consolidates payments, updates the gift list and sends the order to the appropriate merchant for delivery.

The company also provides private-label gift registry technology for merchants that want to set up an online gift registry rather than being part of a larger network.

Felicite's newest technology has the potential to be popular with consumers and retailers, Okamura said.

"It seems like it provides a natural benefit to this area of gift giving," he said.

However, "we see a lot of different new payment technology entering the market," Okamura said. "The question is, will there be enough gift givers who want to share the transaction? We will have to see if the demand is out there."

Copyright © 2006, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

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This article originally appeared at:

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/business/scn-sa-registry3mar25,0,3364357.story