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Don’t take the route followed by a crowd of around 2,000 in Brick Lane, London, this spring! Ten police officers were injured during scuffles between the crowd and the police at the American Apparel casual clothing ‘rummage’, during which three people were arrested. To get a bargain without a criminal record:
Explore the online offerings of your favourite shops – you’ll often find links saying ‘sale’ or ‘special offer‘ or ‘clearance’ all of which can reveal wonderful clothing at anything up to 75% reduced prices.
While you’re there, seek out any additional discounts on offer for online buyers – these will often be headed ‘promotional code’ or ‘discount code’ or ‘coupon’ and will appear at the checkout stage. If you spot such a box, open a new tab and conduct an internet search for the retailer’s name and the phrase used on the retailer’s site – you might get lucky and find a code that reduces the cost even further.
Double up and more by checking the relationship between order number, order cost and delivery cost. You may find that bulk order T-shirts cost only a few pennies more than one alone did, or that by increasing the size of your order until it reaches a few more pounds, you could get free postage – in other words, you might score an entire hoodie or pair of shorts for the same cost as you would have paid for postage.
Use seasonal searches. There are specific times of the year (September for summer wear, for example) that are ideal to seek out bargains. If you’re looking for a winter weight coat, then March or April are great times to be shopping online, while lightweight shirts are often marked down in the autumn and can be bought at bargain prices.
The old rule about ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’ definitely applies in tough economic times, but many people are being caught out by counterfeit goods, especially clothing.
Until recently, counterfeiting wasn’t as prevalent in casual clothing as in high-end designer and fashion garments, but the global recession means that almost every brand and clothing line is being targeted by unscrupulous cheats, many of whom chose to sell their knock-off clothing online.
You can protect yourself against fake clothing vendors by following a few simple rules:
1. Buying clothing online can be a fantastic way to save money – but make sure you buy through a reputable online retailer. Counterfeiters choose to sell this way because it allows them to stay anonymous and the set-up costs of business online are low, so look for a company with a long history in retail and a good range of the kind of clothing you want to buy. While some retailers specialise in a single brand – especially of more expensive garments such as high quality jackets, shoes and trainers – and are perfectly genuine, an online store selling only one brand can also be a sign that a counterfeiter is using that website to offload fake goods, so be doubly careful.
2. Look at the details – detailing can often separate real goods from fake ones. On brand T-shirts, for example, look at what the company in question describes as its ‘signature’ or ‘classic’ styling, such as where brand labels are located, stitching styles and cut. Often, even online, you can see where a picture of the goods doesn’t match up to the company’s signature style, such as a garment looking skinny when the cut is supposed to relaxed or roomy, or a label being slightly different in colour, size or shape. Counterfeiters can produce garments that are almost identical to the real thing, but most are just trying to sell similar looking garments as quickly as possible and don’t pay as much attention to detail so you can catch them out by examining photographs carefully.
3. Ask for references – all good online shops have references and testimonials, but counterfeiters have become good at faking those too! Try googling the company and seeing what comes up: disappointed buyers often vent their fury on consumer sites or in online forums, while satisfied customers of online shops will also tend to enthuse about the good quality of their clothing, the excellence of the service and the speedy delivery. Use these online clues to help you decide where it’s safe to buy.
Why not do a lot of your Christmas shopping online this year? You can grab some bargains as well as making your friends and family happy, and with the time you save trawling around the shops you can put your feet up and have some ‘me’ time.
While money is still tight and the recession still looms over us like a big black cloud, buying clothing online for family and friends is a brilliant idea for Xmas.
Why not get your allotment-loving father, or rugby-mad son a quality, comfortable fleece? You can choose one with sleeves for the man who spends all winter outdoors walking the dog or digging up his garden, while the sleeveless variety is great for standing on the touchline, especially if you’re hoping to be asked to play, as it keeps the core muscles warm while allowing plenty of body movement during the warm-up while you wait to be called onto the pitch.
If you’ve ever worried that your fashion mad daughter or wife doesn’t dress properly for the winter, then buy them a really good winter jacket, one that’s designed for performance, but also has enough style to be fashionable. Look out for the latest hoodies, which are incredibly popular with younger women and that are warm and comfortable enough for a winter walk or a few hours spent wandering around the High Street looking at the New Year Sales.
While you might not think young children would welcome clothing, if you get them all a nice plain white T-shirt or sweatshirt, and some fabric pens so that they can spend Christmas afternoon ‘designing’ their own clothing – it’ll give the grown-ups a bit of peace and quiet, allow the children to express their creativity and – who knows – you might find you’ve got the next Banksy or Armani in the family!
All these gifts can be purchased from polo-shirts.co.uk – they’ll be delivered to your door and you can stop worrying about Christmas before most people have even started.
At polo-shirts.co.uk we strive to please our customers, and we invite everyone who purchases from us to give us feedback that will help us improve our customer service. We’re delighted with our latest google rating – which is measured entirely independently – which tells us that we’ve achieved 4.8 out of 5 from our Google checkout users.
Of course we already knew that we were giving people what they wanted, at prices they valued, with service that exceeded their expectations, because our customers told us so in the comments they left for us on our comments page but it’s great to have an outside confirmation that we’re meeting our aims.
And we’re not taking our success lightly, we intend to continue improving our offering and our service so that everybody who buys from us continues to be as happy as our past customers have been.
Internet shopping has always suited men: it’s solitary, it involves technology, you can do it with food, drink or a cigarette in your hand and you don’t have to hang around outside waiting rooms while your girlfriend fights her way into something she’s going to ask your opinion on. And this happiness to shop from a computer has led to men outshopping women online for the first time, in the first quarter of 2008.
Internet clothing sales are booming: 36% of consumers who have internet access purchased clothes, footwear or accessories online in the last quarter of 2007, almost double the figure two years ago – making fashion second only to books as the most popular internet purchase. Shopping online works for men, because they get to play with technology: mouse and screen etc, and can do price comparison processes which are a large part of any male purchase. It’s only good, in the male mind, if you pay the most, or the least, for something, and never good if you actually have to traipse around the shops to find the cheapest!
Also, as every fashion-conscious wife knows, once a man finds a clothing item he really likes, he will tend to buy it over and over again and the internet is the perfect tool for that – he knows the size, he knows the colour and he knows he wants it delivered so there’s nothing left to do but click the mouse! But where is the new growth in garment retailing online coming from? Well, it’s the men who are interested in fashion, or at least in looking good, but who don’t live in a major city. Designer brands, unusual sizes and personalised clothing like monograms or tailoring the cut have all made internet fashion into a great resource for men.
Male fashion courtesy of defrost.ca
The Postal Strike is over and boy are we glad!
To make sure all our customers received their goods on time from www.polo-shirts.co.uk we used a courier delivery service for all orders during the disruption. Now the strike is over we will be going back to our normal service of sending packages under 1 kilo by royal mail.
Q. There is a postal surcharge for delivering to my address (PA24 xxx). I live in mainland Argyll just 50 minutes drive from Glasgow Airport. Why am I charged £10 for delivery?
A. Our courier company charges us extra for crossing a body of water. So if you live in the Scilly Isles, Isle of Wight, Isle of Man etc…we are charged over 3 times as much to send you your clothes.
At present our system charges you based on the first two letters of your postcode.
We do understand that people who live, for example, in the Paisley (PA) postcode area are on the UK mainland but other parts of the PA postcode are such as Islay & Jura.
If you do live in one of our flagged postcodes we send your goods by Royal Mail. Royal Mail can charge up to £14 for a 20 kilo parcel. We only charge £10 regardless of how many garments you buy and regardless of the weight of the goods.
We hoping to improve our postal code recognition system very shortly so that if you do live on the mainland you will only be charged our standard postage rate of £5.00.
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