It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Spend Money

Barefeetshoes.com seems like an innocent enough site. They have a good selection of cute shoes for excellent prices. A look up of their reviews shows a mixed opinion of them, but no deal breakers. I'd say go ahead and order from them if you have a month or two to receive your shoes. Oh, it wasn't the shipping. They take 3 days to process your order--we'll come back to this-- and my shoes arrived 2 days after this. It's the ordering. It took me three weeks just to order the things.

Barefeetshoes has a lovely policy where they only ship to the address that your credit card is registered to. The only way to circumvent this is with a money order. This is to protect their customers against identity theft. That's very thoughtful of them. It might be more thoughtful if their Nazi-ish adherence to it didn't make it hard to gift them, as my boyfriend was trying to do for me.

Being a college student who moves around a fair bit, my card wasn't registered to my current address but a more permanent one. I changed the address to my current address just so I could purchase a pair of the most perfect shoes ever made. The bank informed me the change had taken place. Apparently that wasn't good enough for the site, since despite me typing the address exactly the same as it appeared on my bank statement three or four times, barefeetshoes still rejected it. I called the site and attempted to phone order, but was told I needed my mother to hold my hand while I dialed to prove that I was who I said I was and her mother holding her hand to prove she was indeed my mother and... Okay, really, they said I had to call my bank and three-way chat with them so they could prove my address.

I rang my bank to learn they had approved my transaction and they could not tell BareFeetShoes.com my address and that I was I. Oh, no. Instead we had to circumvent that by the bank worker asking my my address and having her confirm that it was the address on the account. Joy of joys.

After this game my shoes were finally ordered. I had wanted said shoes for my birthday, which is why I ordered them about a month prior. But my order could not be processed for three days. That's the time it took for the magic elves to find the elusive imaginary purple and orange cows needed to make the shoe. On the second day, they could finally cute out out the shoe, but they'd need a third day to stitch them together. This would have made more sense if their wasn't a charge from the last failed attempt still pending in the bank account along with a dollar account check charge from google, that google failed to inform me of when I signed up for their shopping cart service. Shame to google too.

After these three business days, my shoes arrived two days after. I had ordered two pairs to take advantage of free shipping. What i got was one pair, with a notice that the other pair I had tried to order was out of stock. I would have been more annoyed that no e-mail/phonecall/ etc. had informed me of this had I really cared that much for the second pair I was supposed to receive. Of course, this was also after I missed out on the original additional pair I had ordered and actually wanted. They were the perfect plain pump for me to sequin up for some Wizard of Oz whimsy. It took two weeks to figure out they had canceled that order, though that was more do to my lazy and impatient boy. Luckily, the ones I cared about came and I still received free shipping.

Of course, the ending still wasn't very happy. The shoes I did receive were somewhat beat up. They had discoloration spots, a few tiny stickey dots of goo on one. A price sticker was removed from the sole of the other, leaving it stickey and covered with blond hair and other crud. Dried glue was visible inside and the sole came up at the toe with my first wearing. One of them was also stitched somewhat poorly, with the lining jerked to the outside. I might have attempted to exchange them, however given their crappy service, I didn't want to risk a worse, and I truly am in love with the shoes. Perhaps they heard the bit about me eating their babies when they put me on hold and hung up on me. Or perhaps when they were chatting with other people while on the phone with me. The sound of their physical store was clearly audible over the line.

If I hated them so much, why did I spend three weeks trying to order from them? I orginally saw the shoes at Lulu's. I had seen the triple strap style on Ranna, and adored it, but despared of finding it on any shoe with a heel below 4". But these shoes had the triple strap style and a comfortable and chunky 2.5-3" heel. They were also in purple, a color I had longed to add to my shoe collection. But when I tried to order the beauties, they didn't have a matching pair. Apparently, they had sent out a mismatched pair. I turned to google for help, and found the best price at Barefeetshoes. By the time I realized how craptastic their service was, the one other site I had seen the shoes at --with a considerable price hike which I would gladly pay now for a site that actually wanted to sell shoes-- only had the shoes left in one color, which wasn't the color I wanted. But feast your eyes on these beauties and perhaps you'll see why I went to such pains to secure them, however I will never order from Barefeetshoes again.

Never goign throught that again,

Ivy Frozen