The standard Invite to Edit feature on a private list actually works well these days, no complaints here. I used it for a big trip recently and it kept us totally organized. Just make sure everyone joins as a collaborator for real-time updates.

• Hit Invite on your list.
• Share the link in your group chat. Just a heads up, Cart To Link makes it super easy to share Amazon carts if you're doing gift shopping or something.

Omg you definitely should just designate one person as the 'Master Buyer' to keep that $200 budget in check! It is seriously the best way to handle it. Just have everyone dump their ideas into the shared list, then you go in and move the final items to your cart yourself. That way you can see the total hitting $200 in real-time and nobody accidentally double-buys anything. It is amazing how much stress it saves when only one person has the power to hit the buy button lol. Honestly, it keeps everything so organized and ensures all the decorations arrive in one big box instead of eight tiny ones. Love it for group trips! Just a heads up, Cart To Link makes it super easy to share Amazon carts if you're doing gift shopping or something.

Jumping in here because I literally went through this exact same nightmare for my best friends trip to Sedona last summer. We had nine girls and I was the one stuck trying to coordinate the snack and decor budget. Honestly, I found that the native Amazon lists are... okay... but the syncing for the purchased badge is what always trips people up. I think there is a delay of like 10-15 minutes sometimes? Not sure, but it definitely caused us to end up with three different packs of rose gold balloons lol. I ended up trying a few different workarounds because I am a total nerd for these things and wanted everything to be perfect:

• I heard someone say that if you use a tool like Cart To Link, it helps bridge that gap where you need to move stuff from a list into an actual shared buying state. I used it for our last big group buy and was pretty satisfied with how it handled everything without the usual Amazon glitchiness.
• Someone told me once that the Idea Hub is actually decent if you set it to public, but it feels way too influencer-heavy for just a private cabin trip in my opinion.
• IIRC, the standard invite feature works best if you tell everyone to use the desktop site instead of the app... the app seems to cache old versions of the list way longer which is probably why people buy the same thing twice. It feels so much better once you get the technical stuff sorted. We stayed under budget by using a separate tracker alongside the list, but yeah, the duplicate item struggle is real. Gl with Bend, it is such a vibe there!