Endless.com

Full review
In which a dedicated thrift store shopper finally takes the plunge and buys brand new shoes. Follow our heroine as she spends $28.95, but takes solace in the free shipping. Things look bleak when the shoes don't fit, but the free return policy leads to a happy ending.

The shopping experience

It's been at least two years since I bought actual new clothes; thrift stores are good enough for me! But I've finally come to the realization that what works for clothes doesn't necessarily go for shoes. You can get tired of a shirt and give it away, but you'll keep a comfortable pair of shoes forever. So it's no wonder that I've been unable to find any good used footwear. I knew I was going to have to buy some new shoes for summer, but I really don't like to shop and don't have a lot of time. I browsed several online shoe sites (including Zappos, Shoes and Shoebuy) before settling on Endless.com.

This site has really, really useful shopping tools. To start with, you can select multiple shoe sizes to search for. This is handy if you wear a 7.5 and want to check out the 7's and 8's too. Then you can also select multiple heel heights, colors, brands, widths, and prices.

Say you wanted some sort of brown dress sandal, but weren't sure what. You'd select your size and width, then set an upper price limit. Then you could have the site show you all the brown, gold or beige shoes fitting those criteria. If you wanted to narrow it further, you could say you only want heel under 1" and from 1" to 1 3/4".

I don't know of any other site that does this. In addition, their shoe viewing feature is the best I've seen; not only do you get different angles but you can run a magnifier over the shoe to see it really close up.

Price Matching

I bought a pair of shoes for $39.95, but had seen them elsewhere for $29.95, so right after purchasing them I submitted for a price match. They honored their 110% price guarantee quickly, so I received my shoes and $11 back on my credit card the very next day.

One interesting thing about the price matching is that they don't take shipping costs into account. Shoes.com and shoebuy.com both factor in shipping. So in my case, where I found the same shoes for $29.95 on a site with $8 shipping, endless.com credited me $11. The other sites (assuming they had the same original price) would have credited me $2.20.

The shipping experience

In case you missed when I mentioned it earlier: I got my shoes the very next day! I couldn't quite believe they offer free overnight shipping, but it's true.

Unfortunately, the shoes are too narrow, so I have to return them. But they also offer free return shipping, and it's very easy to do. You can go to the site and print a return label. And you have 365 days to return shoes you decide against.

Returns -- 6/27/08 Update

It took me a while to get around to returning these shoes, but I finally went to the post office last Friday. All I had to do was take the shoes with the return label and drop them off; shipping was free, so I was out of there in about two minutes. I guess having to go the post office to ship these is a small inconvenience, but I can't really hold it against Endless: shoes are too big to drop in a mailbox, and I'm sure arranging UPS pickup for returns would be prohibitively expensive.

I received my refund today, seven days after mailing the shoes. Of course, that's only five business days; given the time it must have taken for the shoes to get back to the company, it seems like they must have processed the refund immediately. So there's another advantage to shopping here.

Room for improvement

Because of all the cool shoe sorting and viewing applications, the site can be a little slow, and a couple of times the list of shoes I was viewing disappeared and I had to start over. I'm assuming they'll iron these things out, since they're still relatively new.

The only other tiny drawback with endless is that there aren't many reviews of the shoe styles on the website, so I kept having to go to zappos to read reviews. So I think everyone should go review some shoes on endless, and then it would be the perfect place to shop for shoes online!

Overall

If you haven't tried this site, you need to at least check it out -- it's as close to actual shoe shopping as I've seen online. If they have your shoe in stock, then you might as well buy it here, too, since their 110% price guarantee assures you of getting the best price. Shipping is quick and returns (if necessary) are hassle-free.