There are a few clothing stores online that offer cheap deals and they do have some good bargains, I have checked. Just remember when buying out of your own country that you might have to pay tax and customs fees on the items when they arrive and this might work out to more than the actual outfit that you have purchased.
Oh I'll remember that alright. My sister sent me a couple of signed t-shirts (from some band that I used to like), and they got stopped at customs. Why? Because there was no bill/invoice attached. Why would there be a bill attached with a gifted item? They said they would have to charge me something for those t-shirts, I was like: "they are t-shirts, they don't have value.". It took me 2 days to get that package cleared. I really hate customs.
How does the Customs system and fees work? I've sold items to customers overseas, but the fees are paid on their end, so I've never dealt with them. Is it like a COD (cash on delivery) system wherein you pay the delivery person when they arrive? Do you have to actually go to Customs to receive the items?
Wow! I didn't know that simple packages such as t-shirts can also be stopped by Customs. I'm also interested to learn about other's experiences on this because I'm also planning on retailing items online so I wouldn't be able to know how the packages would be handled on the other end. Does the Customs check every single package arriving in a particular place. It would be a total hassle for someone buying goods online from another part of the planet.
I didn't know there were extra fees for your products to go through customs. A few years ago I ordered several things from China and didn't have to pay any extra customs fees that I was aware of. The shipping was a little more in general, and I had to wait several weeks for my items to arrive though. If anything, my biggest problem with ordering stuff from overseas was that the items I got were almost all counterfeit and or not shipped in full. Recently I tried ordering some clothes online from Sears's web site, and was unpleasantly surprised to discover how expensive everything was. For many years I got almost all of my clothing at a local Dillars outlet store that sold everything at dirt cheap prices, but they shut down a couple years ago, so now I had to go back to paying "full price". I don't recall Sears every being that expensive in the past, but they wanted $65 for a freaking sweatshirt that I was interested in. I managed to get the price down a wee bit by finding some coupon codes online. But I would never expect to pay that much for something like that from Sears - Nordstroms or Dillards maybe, but not Sears. Even K-Mart's online site was expensive with their clothing.
I hate not living in the United States and having to pay taxes for importation. I understand why the government needs to tax products but that's one of the things that really turn me off when it comes to online shopping. My favorite (cheap) clothing online stores are Romwe and SheInside currently. They're not best quality but you certainly get what you paid for, and the clothes are really creative and pretty.
My country even charges around $3 as "storage fee", and all parcels are held up at customs, no matter if they only cost $1 or $100. Then they also tax you according to the price of the item that you have bought. So that's the reason why I have stopped buying stuff online, since it gets pretty expensive when it lands in customs.
If you can time your purchases and are willing to purchase a significant amount of clothing from a particular store, you can save significant money in purchasing clothes online. For example, if you are a Kohl's charge card holder, you can find numerous codes online to get up to 30% off you total purchase cost and get free shipping if in the US. They have an additional benefit for Gold card owners (have to spend ~ $600/yr at Kohl's to upgrade) of $5-10 reward cards which directly deduct from your total cost as well. By buying on their early bird/night owl specials, I have often saved 60-70% off of the base retail price for the merchandise.
It's true what you say, I have seen some online stores that sell nice clothing, but I'd end up paying double for the shirt that I see after taxes, and shipping. Sometimes the shipping is more than the shirt itself. I don't like that, and it makes me feel like online shopping does no justice. I have found many stores online that have awesome deals like buy one and get one free, plus free shipping. When you can find deals like that or better, then it's worth shopping online.
