THESE SITES HELP YOU CASH IN YOUR WEDDING DRESS
If you’re among the millions of women who got married over the past few years, you probably have a beautiful and expensive gown gathering dust in a closet. The question is, why? A number of sites will help you sell a wedding dress and potentially recover a good amount of the thousands of dollars you spent.
And with spring just around the corner, millions of future brides are in shopping mode. So this is a particularly good time to sell a wedding dress. Some of these sites will also sell bridesmaid’s, mother-of-the-bride (or groom) and flower-girl dresses, too.
The cost to sell a wedding dress — or bridesmaid dresses — is often nominal, particularly considering what you spent. And, unless you’re planning a personal remake of “27 Dresses,” who needs a closet full of never-to-be-used-again wedding wear?
Sell a wedding dress
There are four sites dedicated to buying and selling lightly used wedding wear. And there are several general clothing and merchandise sites that are also worth considering when you want to sell a wedding dress.
Notably, brides-to-be can save hundreds of dollars using these sites to buy, too.
Used wedding gowns typically sell for between 40 percent and 60
percent of the retail price. And, in many cases, they’ve never been worn. Why? Some brides change their minds about the gown prior to the wedding. But, if you’ve signed a contract to buy a gown, you’re committed to it. These brides have little choice but to resell their second-string wedding dress in the hope of recouping at least a portion of the cost.
Here are your options when you want to buy or sell a wedding dress.
Still White
Still White is our top pick for selling never-worn and slightly used wedding gowns. What makes it our top choice? It’s relatively inexpensive to list a gown for sale here and the site gets plenty of
website traffic — read that as potential customers.
Still White gets roughly 800,000 site visitors each month, according to website rating service SimilarWeb. While that’s a fraction of the web traffic going to a general sales site like eBay, you can expect that everyone who visits Still White is looking for a wedding dress.
You have two options to sell a dress here. You can do a standard listing, which includes 4 photos, for $25. Or you can pay $35 for a premium listing, which gets your gown more exposure and allows you to include up to 8 photos, plus a video. In both cases, your gown is listed until it sells.
Once Wed
It’s even cheaper to sell at Once Wed. Here you pay a one-time $19.95 listing fee to sell a wedding dress and just $5 to sell any other wedding wear, such as a bridesmaid or flower girl dress.
You can also sell shoes, purses, veils and mother-ofthe-bride/groom dresses on this site. Your items will stay listed for as long as it takes to be sold.
The downside to selling here is that this site gets about one-tenth of the site traffic of Still White, with roughly 70,000 page views a month. But that’s also probably why it is the least-expensive site to list a wedding gown or bridesmaid dress for sale.
That said, this site sells plenty of dresses. So for this modest fee, it may be worth a try.
PreOwned Wedding Dresses and Nearly Newlywed
The other two weddingwear specific sites are PreOwned Wedding Dresses and Nearly Newlywed. Like the others, both sites will list a wedding gown for a flat fee. However, unlike the others, these sites also impose a commission on the sale. PreOwned Wedding Dresses charges a 20 percent commission; Nearly Newlywed imposes a 30 percent commission.
With the sale of something as expensive as a wedding dress, commissions can take a huge bite out of your net proceeds. On a $2,000 sale, for instance, the seller would walk away with $1,575 at PreOwned and just $1,380 when sold on Nearly Newlywed. (The listing fee is $20 at Nearly Newlywed and $25 at PreOwned.)
Poshmark
You can sell almost any type of clothing or accessories on Poshmark. But what makes it worthwhile to consider as a place to sell a wedding dress or bridesmaid dress is that the site encourages people who are your size — and who like your taste — to follow you.
Sellers here create a “closet” and either sell their own clothes — or resell items they buy and potentially refurbish. Popular closets can have millions of followers, which makes it easy to sell here — even with one-of-a-kind items like a wedding dress. The catch? Poshmark charges a 20 percent commission.
Still, this may be a great place to market bridesmaid’s and mother-of-the-bride/groom dresses. These appeal to a wider market, since they can be used for events other than a wedding. Additionally, since they sell for lower price points, it’s less of an economic hit to pay Poshmark’s commission.
eBay
No story about selling used clothing is complete without mentioning eBay, one of the world’s top retailing sites. At eBay, you can sell everything from heavy machinery to candles. And while that may not make it sound like it’s a great spot to sell a wedding dress, this site draws hundreds of millions of buyers from all over the world.
Moreover, if you’re selling an expensive item, like a wedding dress, the site discounts its normal commission. Commissions on women’s clothing sold for more than $2,000 are 9 percent, versus the site’s normal clothing commission of 15 percent.
Other options
Although they’re not wedding-specific sites, there are a lot of other options that might be worth testing out. Local listing sites, such as OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and Nextdoor have the advantage of being close to potential buyers.
With wedding dresses, allowing brides the ability to try on your gown can be a big selling point. Moreover, all three of these sites will let you list your dress for free.
To be sure, most buyers on these sites are looking for sofas, plumbers and a wide array of other items that have nothing to do with weddings. Still, there’s no cost to try. And you might get lucky.