Some people just love to complain. Google DressLily and you’ll find page after page of negative reviews, all from people who, quite possibly, have misunderstood what DressLily is and why everything is so cheap.
Buying From Abroad
The first thing you have to understand about DressLily is that you aren’t purchasing a dress from a New York company with a warehouse in Wisconsin. You’re buying a dress from a Chinese company in China. There is no contact phone number if things go wrong because of the cost involved with hiring fluent customer service staff – costs which would be passed on to you, the consumer.
Shipping Takes Forever
In an Amazon world we all want our stuff delivered within a day. Unfortunately, when you buy items from China and choose to have free shipping, your products are taking the slow boat to America. The Chinese government, to help companies compete internationally, subsidizes mail delivery in and from China. Once your package is off the boat in America, the tracking number provided will no longer work – it’s a tracking number for China Post, even though your package will ultimately arrive at your house via USPS.
If you want a faster shipping method or want a tracking number from the factory to your door, you’ll have to pay more. Unfortunately, FedEx and DHL are not cheap.
The Quality is Subpar
When you’re spending $5 on a skirt and having it shipped across the world for free, you have to lower your expectations about quality. DressLily gets its designs from photographs and replicates them in their factory. Reviews that include “the photo was photo shopped!” are erroneous because the actual dress you buy has in no way been photographed for DressLily.
That being said, where else can you buy a $5 skirt?! The epitome of fast fashion, DressLily specializes in getting you the latest fashions at an unbelievable price.
My Own Experience
I buy a lot of stuff from online. Recently I purchased a party dress for a Christmas party. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a dress I would only wear once and I wanted to be fashionable so I tried DressLily. Knowing that my dress would take over a month to arrive, I purchased it in mid-October, giving myself plenty of time to find a Plan B if it didn’t arrive or if I didn’t like it.
By the end of November my dress had arrived. It didn’t look quite like the picture but it wasn’t terrible. I took it for a spin on my sewing machine to make it fit a bit more to my body shape. Then I steamed it (it was so crinkled from its trip in the mail!) and hung it in my closet until the party.
When I wore it to my Christmas party the dress fit like a glove and although the quality wasn’t the same as you’d find in a department store, the dress was only $40 instead of $240. Once I got home I threw the dress into the back of my closet and will likely never wear it again – Inexpensive items FTW!
DressLily isn’t perfect. Shipping is slow, customer service is almost non-existent and quality standards are below what you would find in stores. The price though, just cannot be beat. Being able to dress in the latest trends for prices that won’t hurt your bank account is worth so much more than having a real cashmere sweater that you’ll probably grow bored of in two weeks!
