Review: Swap.com - Online Thrift Store (Baby Clothes order)
Overall score: 15 out of 20 (Above average; good condition clothes; good value)
Enter Swap.com. It's a site I've been aware of for a while, but I've never made a purchase as you need a $60 minimum to get free shipping, and I've never needed $60 worth of clothes from there before. Swap has men's, women's, and children's clothing. You can search the site via clothing type, size, gender, and even clothing condition. You can also sort your search by low price to high.
I started my shopping spree by searching for 18mth girl clothes in good condition or better. I unchecked types I didn't think I would need. I sorted low price to high and just threw everything in the cart that caught my eye to sort through later. Most of this stuff was around $3 a piece. Once I thought I had enough options of a certain type I would uncheck it from the search so that there wouldn't be so much to get through. At the very end, when I had over 100 things in my cart, lol, I took a peek at the higher priced dresses as I need a fancy dress for my baby's dedication in a couple months.
Once my cart was full of my options, it was time to narrow things down. I scrolled through a couple times getting rid of anything that didn't 'spark joy,' and then it was time to do direct comparisons. If there was 5 of an item type and I only needed two, I'd keep only the cutest or cheapest, for example. Sometimes I really liked two things but had to get rid of one, so these I moved over to my wishlist/save for later section. This came in handy as once I had everything I 'needed' I needed to add a couple more items back in to get my free shipping, so just moved over a few things from my wishlist.
A lot of things were on sale due to Winter Clearance, and I had a 30% off code (FRESH, no idea when it expires - just google and one can usually find codes for 10-30% off SWAP.com.) There was one item that the code wouldn't work for, a cute dress, so I swapped it out for a cute tunic I also liked but that the code worked on.
In the end, I paid about $68 - hitting the $60 needed for free shipping plus sales tax. For that $68 I got 29 individual clothing pieces for an average price of $2.35 an item - pretty nice!
1 Tutu
1 Skort
1 Shorts
2 Cardigan/Shrugs
1 Hoodie
1 Vest
3 Shirts
1 Robe/Swim Cover Up
9 Dresses (Yes that's a lot, lol. Most of the items I put back in my cart to reach the minimum for free shipping were dresses. Some of these are church/event dresses and a couple are casual play.)
4 Jeans (originally was only going to get two, but a couple pairs were in cheap pant sets)
5 Pants
[I didn't get too many shirts since I normally put Abriella in onesies right now. She still mostly crawls so shirts tend to ride up. I thought the tunic top would be OK but it rides up as well.]
The most expensive item was an adorable Nanette Dress at $5.20 that looked to be new with tags from it's product photo, but was marked as good condition. When I got it I saw why! It was indeed new with tags, but was only one piece of a two piece set so it hadn't been marked as new.
Everything came individually plastic wrapped in a big plain brown box. A few of the garments had Swap.com tags.
I'm not going to post pictures of all the clothes as there are so many! But in general, most items were in very nice condition. There were a few where the fabric was pretty used and starting to get rough or pill slightly in places from so many washes, and some items had a few loose threads or a smooshed bow, but only one item of the batch had stains (very small) and only one item had any sort of hole (some teeny tiny holes in the tulle of the tutu skirt, no one could notice once on.) Items marked good condition are not supposed to have any holes or stains though, so I could have returned those items - it just didn't make sense to do so for a $1 tutu and less than $5 dress where the stains were almost unnoticeable.
My biggest issue, which is a frequent issue with used clothing, was that many items had a bit of an odor. For the most part this was probably fabric softener - not everyone uses fragrance free and so some had a strong scent like lavender or something. (And I'm sensitive to the scent of lavender, so I threw the worst offenders into the wash.) One garment had a slight scent of something like tobacco to it, so may have come from a smoking home.
In retrospect, I probably got her more clothes than needed considering how fast she is growing! But it's nice to have the extra options for her so she isn't wearing the same onesie and pair of jeans twice a week.
Overall, I think it's a good website and the clothes were mostly in pretty good condition. Frequent sales mean items can be picked up for cheap. And since there is more than just kids clothes, one could pick up items for the whole family. In addition to clothes they have shoes, toys, and other accessories as well.
Some downsides:
- Items might have flaws despite their quality checks (though returns are free, you can only return *up to three* items from one order. And it's not the simplest process.)
- You are limited to what inventory they have in the size you want.
- There is a LOT of inventory to get through. You can use filters to pare it down (size, gender, color, condition, type, etc.) but it's not a fast process. It took me more than a couple of hours to search and find items I liked to put in my cart and then another half hour or so to decide on my final cart.
- Sales might be on out of season items and not the items you are hoping to get
Will I order from there again? Perhaps. I think the best time to order might be when a child is just going into a size, like whenever my eldest daughter gets into the 5Ts. Then ordering a giant batch of clothes would make sense, and since I would have her basic wardrobe covered I could use money saved to supplement with some special items (like get her another Kidbox or shop specifically for items in her style.)
Edit: I just put in a second order! They had a one-day-only special where you could get free shipping for only $15+ worth of stuff rather than $68. Since I needed a few more 3-6 month clothes I was able to get 13 items of clothing for $22 including tax.
[Swap also has a program where you can mail in items, they will look them over and photograph them, post them on your site, and you get paid when they sell! I might try this out if I ever get enough good condition used clothing to make it worth trying!]
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