Buying your wedding dress online

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The biggest reason I bought my dress online was due to the fact that I refused to spend more than a couple of hundred dollars on this dress, or a lot of time searching for the perfect vintage dress that was within my budget. The eco-dresses out there are fantastic, but I couldn't find anything that was really my style or in my budget. It would have been fun to search for that vintage dress, but I knew it would have taken a lot of time that I didn't have! However, shopping online means you can't try it on (and most places won't take returns), you're not supporting a local business, the dress was likely made overseas, and with all the transportation from wherever its made, to their warehouse to your door, there are a lot of fossil fuels used. I feel pretty bad about those aspects, so I was determined to find something I could wear again.

I also had a pretty good idea of what I wanted in terms of cut, style, length, etc. (tea-length, casual, strapless - like a summer sun dress) I did go to one local bridal shop that purportedly had a good selection of affordable vintage, tea-length dresses but the service was pretty terrible and I didn't find anything close to what I was looking for. If you have no idea what you are looking for, then trying to find a wedding dress online is going to be really challenging.
Here are some things I learned along the way:

• Google image search is your friend!
• If its incredibly unbelievably cheap, you're likely buying a replica - beware!
• Try to find a picture of a real bride wearing the dress so you can see how it would look on someone other than the 5'10" 115lb model wearing it.
• Read reviews of the place you're buying the dress from, and make sure they are legit before giving up your credit card number. Also, make sure they are authorized by the manufacturer to sell the dress, otherwise it could be a knock-off and of poor quality.
  
• Pay close attention to the manufacturer's size chart and measure yourself before you commit to ordering a certain size - dress sizes are different than street-clothes sizes!
• That said, budget for alterations! Its very likely you'll have to make some changes to make it fit perfectly. My dress cost about $200 with shipping but the alterations were well over $300. I was ok with that since no matter what the cost of the dress I'd have to have it altered. It was also my opportunity to give some business to a local dressmaker!

I ended up buying my Dessy dress from Tie The Knot Bride (they are an authorized retailer) and had a good experience. They estimated that the dress would be shipped 10 weeks after I ordered it, but it was delivered in about 6 weeks.