Clothing Company Review: Stay away from Sheinside

Warning: this blog post contains a lot of text.  But if you read through all of it, I hope you walk away understanding that you should always research an unknown company first before purchasing from them.  This is my story about my horrible interaction with Sheinside, an online clothing company.

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Reading through fashion blogs is a leisurely interest of mine.  I love seeing how such stylish and ambitious young ladies put together outfits.  It's great for fashion inspiration and emboldens me to try new color combinations or mix and match patterns that wouldn't have otherwise crossed my mind.  Often times these bloggers will link to exact (or similar) items in their blog posts via a company affiliate link that pays them some small sum should anyone purchase an item through that URL.

It was through blog posts such as these that I became aware of Chicwish and Sheinside.  I discovered Chicwish first and loved a lot of their skirts, but decided they were a little too pricey given the material makeup of the garments, and so I never ordered from them.  So when I stumbled across Sheinside via some fashion blog I was elated to see that they had a lot of the same items as Chicwish, but at lower prices.  After some debate and some fastidiousness on my part in terms of what I wanted to buy, I decided to purchase from them.  And there began my awful customer service journey with Sheinside.

Before I go on, let me point out that both of these companies are based out of Asia.  So, understandably, shipping will take longer than companies that have hubs in the United States.  Initially, that wasn't a problem for me.  I actually received three of my items from my order within 5 days, most likely because they were sitting in a warehouse in California instead of in Asia.  Unfortunately, despite ordering using the measurements listed for each item, none of them fit.  Moreover, two of the items were defective and very cheaply made.

Cue a couple of days later.  After one week of waiting, I still hadn't received any notification about the rest of my order being shipped, yet Sheinside had already decided to charge me for all of the items I'd ordered.  In my experience, most companies won't charge you until they've packaged and shipped your order.  Not so with Sheinside.  Since my outstanding items hadn't been shipped yet, I sent an email and an instant message to Sheinside requesting that they cancel the rest of my order, issue me a refund for those outstanding items, and give me a shipping address so that I could return the three items that didn't fit/were defective.

What I quickly found out through my interactions with Sheinside, among other things, is that any response you receive from "customer service" reads like it has been put through an online translator.  This lead me to silently wonder why they didn't have anyone proficient in English, Italian, etc. (as they sell to many other countries).  Since they're selling to countries who don't speak their native language, it'd probably be a good idea if they hired some people who could more or less reply in decent English, Italian, etc.

Translation issues aside, at this point I was worried I wouldn't get any money back after seeing what other customers had to say online about this company; most everything I ran into had very frustrated customers venting in their reviews about Sheinside.  Thankfully, I eventually received all of my money back (including for the items I shipped back*).  Annoyingly, though, my refund was botched every time they attempted to return my money.  It took several emails on my part asking why I'd only received X amount back out of the total and demanding that they refund me the rest of my money.

By the end I'd had enough.  I was trying to get the very last bit of money refunded to me and they hadn't replied to me after three days.  So I finally sent a very irritated email to them accusing them (and rightly so) of horrible customer service and asking if they handled everyone's refunds in such a poor manner and demanded that they refund me the last little bit of my money they happened to conveniently "forget" to return to me.  All of this happened over the time span of about a month.  If I hadn't received my money back I'd been seriously considering sending in a complaint to the Better Business Bureau and/or to the Federal Trade Commission, that's how bad my experience was with Sheinside.

As for my asterisk about the shipping--when you visit their website for the first time the first pop up you receive indicates that you can have free return shipping (at least for those of us who live in the U.S.).  I actually asked if I could receive free return shipping in one of my first emails to Sheinside regarding my returns and never got my question answered.  By that point I was tired of dealing with them and paid the $13 out of pocket to ship my three items back to California.

Long story short, stay away from Sheinside.  (I can't vouch for Chicwish, but to be honest I have absolutely no desire to find out if they're better or just as horrible as Sheinside.  I tend to read that Chicwish is a little better than Sheinside.)  Sheinside doesn't seem to have strict quality control of their items.  They also have awful customer service.  They take several days to reply to you, they don't answer all of your questions, and it's like pulling teeth to get a proper refund from them.  Overall rating is an epic fail for this company.

Now, others may have had more positive experiences with them, but this is my own personal experience.  I have the emails and bank statements to back up everything I've said, so let's hope Sheinside doesn't try to get cute with me.  I hope that in sharing my story with the public that others will take heed and research unfamiliar companies first before deciding to take the plunge and make a purchase.

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