How To Order Your Wedding Dress Safely Over the Internet

First, some context.  This was our week of helping out two brides who ordered their dresses from less-than reputable Internet retailers. One bride ended up with a dress eight inches too short. Not exactly a minor detail!  The other bride is not happy with her dress overall: essentially it does not match the picture provided on the Web site.

Here is some advice to follow BEFORE ordering from an Internet retailer so this does not happen to you:

• If the price sounds too good to be true, it is. Beware!
• Find and print the return policy. (This however was no help to one of our brides. Despite having a return policy, the retailer is not honoring it!)
• Realize that by paying with PayPal your protection as a buyer is limited to receiving the item or not. If the item is not as described, your recourse is with the vendor, not with PayPal
• Make sure you are seeing the retailer's own photo of the dress in question, or pictures of other dresses that they have made. I can't stress this point enough!
• Order a fabric sample. There is no better way than to see it in person.
• Only order from people you can communicate with easily, preferably by phone. Communication is so important when explaining the details of your dress. An e-mail description is fine to start the process, but a live conversation is must before you finalize everything.
• If your dress design is a combination of several dresses and otherwise hard for you to visualize, it is best to have a designer sketch it out for you so that you are sure that 1) you like the way the elements look together and 2) you know what you will be getting.