Manufacturer registration of consumer electronic devices includes a registration server receiving purchaser-specific information from a user computer over a network, such as the Internet. This received purchaser-specific information may then be associated with a temporary short code, which is in turn provided back to the user computer over the network. The purchaser is then free to input the provided temporary short code into the consumer electronic device to be registered, after which both the short code and certain additional device-specific identification information may be provided directly by the consumer electronic device to the registration server over a network connection. The provided short code may then be matched to the previously-provided purchaser-specific information, and the manufacturer registration process completed using both the purchaser-specific information and the device-specific identification information.