Once Wed: Wedding Gown Sales Site Sold

What is Once Wed?

Once Wed was among a half-dozen sites that offer to sell your new or used wedding gown for a flat fee. However, it appears to have been purchased by PreOwnedWeddingDresses. We are keeping this review live during a transition period. However, we recommend you check out our review of PreOwnedWeddingDresses.

How it works

This site had a very simple structure. If you want to list a wedding dress, you pay a one-time $19.95 fee.

You’ll be asked to describe the dress in detail, noting the brand, the measurements and posting photographs — ideally of you wearing the dress at your wedding.

Your dress will stay listed for as long as it takes to be sold. That’s important because wedding gowns are not an overnight sale. You probably won’t recover the full cost of what you paid, when you resell a wedding dress, of course. But even half of the cost of a $3,000 designer gown is a lot of money.

If you want to list a bridesmaid’s dress, a flower-girl dress or any other wedding item or accessory, you pay $5.

Site traffic

Wedding dresses are a tough sell because buyers need to not only like your taste, they need to be a similar size — or smaller — for the dress to work.

So, the key to selling an item like this is getting enough potential buyers looking to find that similar-sized, like-minded bride who is willing to buy a dress that she hasn’t yet tried on. And Once Wed does get plenty of eyeballs on your dress, with roughly 70,000 brides searching the site each month.

That said, that’s the lowest monthly traffic of the four wedding dress sales sites we review on SideHusl.com. But, Once Wed is also charges the least to list. It may be worth trying this site first and listing on a second site, if you don’t get any nibbles.

Scam protections

The site also works with PayPal to make sure that buyers get what they paid for — and that sellers get payment. You can also send sales through Escrow.com — a good idea and important when you’re selling an expensive item.

Recommendations

This was a reasonable place to list a wedding dress for sale. However, since the site appears to have merged with Preowned Wedding Dresses. Another good site to sell used wedding wear is Still White.

What their users say:

From Wedding Bee:

“I wore 2 wedding dresses to my wedding and I wanted to sell both now that my wedding is over, so i posted them on Once Wed.com. One dress was sold to someone in the US – thankfully no issue. Another dress, a very popular style, has about 8 inquiries so far – and 7 are from Australia!!  is that possible or is it a scam from same group that scams that dress using different email accounts? Questions I have been asked: Some people asks for photos: ok not that weird. Some people say “please tell me since my fiance is funding it” (which sounds sketchy since i read somewhere that’s a phrase commonly used in a scam scheme), and that same person asked how much my dress would cost if she handles the shipping (whatever that means, how does someone handle shipping when i have the dress?)”

From Wedding Wire:

If you know your size in a specific dress (or designer), and are smart about knowing what an easy alteration is vs. a challenging or risky one – these sites are for you especially. Both dresses I purchased off these pre-owned sites were New With Tags and I saved a lot. I plan to sell the final dress I wore… on whichever of the two sites it sells on first!”

Updated 1/12/2024