Where to Buy Designer Accessories Online

It may be tempting to head to eBay for your designer fashion accessories, but before you do, remember: a Kate Spade in the hand is worth a dozen $150 knockoffs online.

You can do some substantial designer shopping online, but more than ever, it’s a world of deals that are too good to be true. So, which sites can you trust to deliver the real goods? Look for sites the designers have built, and then look for big sites that offer big discounts.

Visit Prada.com or Fendi.com, and you will have the opportunity to buy directly from the design house, depending on where you live. Virtually every designer boasts a virtual store for your convenience, and if money is no object, it’s a perfectly reasonable venue through which to procure your name-brand fashion accessories. If you’d like to shop around, however, do a little digging into the site’s background and any available customer feedback before you load up your shopping cart.

A good measure of a site’s reliability is its staying power. A site that dupes its customers won’t be around long, so look for sites that are publically traded and whose stock values are headed up instead of down. One such site is Bluefly.com (Nasdaq: BFLY), which offers top brands at deep discounts. Another measure of a good site is its ties to the fashion industry. The site eLuxury.com is owned by a subsidiary of Louis Vuitton and offers partner site commissions, so it’s a good bet there are no fakes being sold through the site.

A good clue that the site carries the real thing is item availability and cost. Stock should turn over quickly, should be varied, should be available in only certain sizes, and should never be dirt cheap. A discount site that moves a lot of quality merchandise will not have to have clearance sales at rock-bottom prices. If you must pursue the online auction tack, patronize auctions offered by sellers with online stores. Those stores should be ranked among the top of their class and should have no less than 98 percent positive customer feedback. Read feedback from the past 90 days pertaining to designer accessory purchases, and if you find any negative feedback questioning the authenticity of an item, move on to another auction. Especially with these sites, as with all online shopping, you won’t be able to see the item first, and caveat emptor is the order of the day. Whichever method you choose to purchases brand-name products online, check the return policy before you “proceed to checkout.”