Apparently Americans will return 10% of their Christmas gifts this year and the breakdown is fascinating. 62% of returns will be clothing and shoes that don’t fit properly or aren’t considered ‘suitable’ by the recipient. Not even close, by comparison, is the 16% toys, games and hobby supplies that will be returned and exchanged, closely followed by 14% returns in consumer electronics.

So what can you do to avoid being the giver of an unwanted gift or being lumbered with something you don’t want?

First, if you’re not sure about the item you’re buying, ask about the retailer’s returns policy – some online retailers have a brilliant exchange system for gifts, others charge a fortune in return postage – be sure that it’s possible to return or get a refund on an unwanted gift item so that the recipient can get something they do want.

If you’re the recipient, you may wish to ask the giver of an unwanted present for the receipt – it’s tricky but if you know them well and are willing to explain why (I already have one, it’s a size too small/large, I don’t wear T-shirts that colour etc) it can be done tactfully. Saying ‘I hate it and will never wear it’ may not get you the receipt, in fact, it may ensure you don’t get many more presents, so run your reasoning by a third party before launching into your request!

Always bear in mind that if they buyer didn’t pay cash, your refund may take the form of a gift token or voucher or for some stores, you can only get a refund onto the card that was used to make the purchase.

If you can’t exchange or refund, you can try selling your unwanted item on eBay – there are fee free weekends where the bulk of items on offer are unwanted gifts. Alternatively you can try for a swap – if it’s worth less than £50 lots of local papers allow you to put in a free advert, or even just give it away to a charity shop or online through sites like Freecycle, Greencyle or Freegle, in the hope that karma will deliver a free item that you want at some point in future.

In the past year, Indian shoppers have got into buying clothing online in a big way. The division by gender is around 70% male to 30% female, with retailers focusing on social media to reach out to women who are a growth market for all forms of retail in India. Global clothing companies are rushing to get into this market, especially to bring their retail expertise to many customers who live in small towns, villages and the hamlets or rural India.

Casual apparel has the second highest seller online in India: ahead of books and DVDs. India’s ‘internet population’ has moved into e-commerce with ease: the nation has around 10 million online shoppers, a market that is growing at 40-45%, compared to the global rate of around 8-10% growth. eBay India retails a garment every seven minutes – many of which are sports shoes and clothing with Adidas and Reebok featuring highly in the popularity stakes.

Children’s wear is also a rapidly growing market with Indian mums investing in clothes and shoes, along with feeding bottles, buggies and toys. Menswear is growing too:one company that sells work shirts at under 900 rupees each has sold 2,500 shirts since it launched in August and is expecting to sell 5,000 collared shirts a month in 2012.

Personalised workout clothing is a big seller, with monogrammed hoodies and polo-shirts being a regular purchase by individuals and as presents or to commemorate work events such as promotions or anniversaries, which are popular celebrations in Indian culture.

It’s the time of year when teenagers migrate to their new homes: student dorms, digs, shared flats and other accommodation where they will live (and maybe learn) for the next few years.

New students are easy to spot: they arrive laden with possessions and with Mum and Dad in tow – some have packed the family cars to the roof, others have even hired a van to help them move in, but how useful is all that equipment?

This year it seems there are fewer flat screen TVS and smaller cases of new clothing as the recession continues to bite. Vast amounts of new stationery have been purchased though: retailers report good sales although all more towards the ‘essentials’ than the ‘luxury’ end of the market.

In the USA, students (and their parents) are expected to spend $808 on clothing, electronic items and furnishings for their first year of college life in 2011 and Edinburgh University reckons students should budget on spending around £13 a week on clothes.

All students are looking for ways to stretch their budgets and seeking out good deals and saving money on college clothing can help them, and their parents, to make the best of the money available.

Ensuring that a student has a sensible coat and boots that will keep them warm and dry in a climate that may be unfamiliar to them, and summer clothing that can double as simple sportswear all help save money on the long run.

Choose T-shirts that can be worn to the bar or to play a game of football, and polo-shirts that double up for seminar attendance, cinema trips and attending interviews for part-time jobs to boost the budget. Ensuring the student has lots of socks and underwear can really help them save money on laundry (and maybe even mean they don’t save up all their dirty washing to bring home with them) and some parents are buying in bulk so that they can replace stained or shredded T-shirts when those rare visits home occur. It means that they can be sure their child has clothing that coordinates together and is easy to wash and wear.

Don’t let your new student take a printer to college until they’ve investigated the costs of printing on campus – with student union cards, many colleges and academic libraries can print reports and papers more cheaply than the student can.

Have you ever had that experience where you see a fantastic item in a shop window and yet when you try it on, it just doesn’t look good on you? Most of us have been through that disappointment and it’s one of the things that can make shopping online quite stressful – bad enough to feel the let down when you try something on in the shop, but so much worse to feel it when you’ve ordered something and had it delivered and then have to send it back.

The answer is to put in a bit of research first. There are so many different ways of sizing clothes (even the New York Times can’t work it out) that it’s good try on some of the clothes from major brands to see how they fit you – that helps you choose the right size when you shop online.

Then look for an online retailer who’s been around for a while – there are loads of fly-by-night scamsters, often selling fake clothing, who vanish before any disgruntled customer can get to them to ask for a refund, so companies who have been selling online for several years have normally ironed out their customer service and are able to offer excellent advice: look out for numbers for advisers you can call to talk through your decisions – you may not need to use them but the fact that they exist is a positive sign. Google the company and see what others have said about them – that helps you work out which are the genuine long-term retailers who care about customers and selling really good clothing online.

Check delivery systems carefully, many small sites deliver only within their own national boundaries – and look at the delivery costs because often you can make a substantial saving if you shop with a friend and get a bulk discount or reach the ‘free delivery’ level.

If you’ve ever tried to make a Christmas spending budget and stick to it, you’ll know how tough it can be. Here are some tips to help:

Have budgeting goals

One reason we don’t stick to a budget is that there’s no incentive. Saving money is not enough of a reason to keep to our agreed limits. Try to envisage what the money you save will be spent on – do you want a new netbook or the down-payment for a car? If so, keeping the big goal in mind can help you stick to your budget of only spending a certain amount on party clothing over the Christmas season, for example

Don’t apply across the board cuts

Many novice budgeters think that you have to ‘cut all expenses’ but that’s not the case. There are places to cut expenditure: overdrafts, eating out, entertainment, then the  places that you shouldn’t skimp: good shoes, well-fitting clothes, heating etc and finally the places you can make judgements for yourself: posh food or designer clothes? 4 star hotel or budget one?

Be accountable

One reason budgets fail is that you don’t keep track of them. You can do this either with envelopes containing the money you can spend in each category each month. Once an envelope is empty, no more spending in that category until next month. Or by using a simple spreadsheet that connects to your bank account to keep track of what you’re doing.

Have fun

Think about ways you can enjoy your expenditure. Go shopping with friends – even online shopping can be done with friends: order in a pizza and get together to browse an online retailer, placing a bulk order so that you save money on delivery costs by buying in bulk together!

Don’t take the route followed by a crowd of around 2,000 in Brick Lane, London, this spring! Ten police officers were injured during scuffles between the crowd and the police at the American Apparel casual clothing ‘rummage’, during which three people were arrested. To get a bargain without a criminal record:

Explore the online offerings of your favourite shops – you’ll often find links saying  ‘sale’ or ‘special offer‘ or ‘clearance’ all of which can reveal wonderful clothing at anything up to 75% reduced prices.

While you’re there, seek out any additional discounts on offer for online buyers – these will often be headed ‘promotional code’ or ‘discount code’ or ‘coupon’ and will appear at the checkout stage. If you spot such a box, open a new tab and conduct an internet search for the retailer’s name and the phrase used on the retailer’s site – you might get lucky and find a code that reduces the cost even further.

Double up and more by checking the relationship between order number, order cost and delivery cost. You may find that bulk order T-shirts cost only a few pennies more than one alone did, or that by increasing the size of your order until it reaches a few more pounds, you could get free postage – in other words, you might score an entire hoodie or pair of shorts for the same cost as you would have paid for postage.

Use seasonal searches. There are specific times of the year (September for summer wear, for example) that are ideal to seek out bargains. If you’re looking for a winter weight coat, then March or April are great times to be shopping online, while lightweight shirts are often marked down in the autumn and can be bought at bargain prices.

The old rule about ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’ definitely applies in tough economic times, but many people are being caught out by counterfeit goods, especially clothing.

Until recently, counterfeiting wasn’t as prevalent in casual clothing as in high-end designer and fashion garments, but the global recession means that almost every brand and clothing line is being targeted by unscrupulous cheats, many of whom chose to sell their knock-off clothing online.

You can protect yourself against fake clothing vendors by following a few simple rules:

1.    Buying clothing online can be a fantastic way to save money – but make sure you buy through a reputable online retailer. Counterfeiters choose to sell this way because it allows them to stay anonymous and the set-up costs of business online are low, so look for a company with a long history in retail and a good range of the kind of clothing you want to buy. While some retailers specialise in a single brand – especially of more expensive garments such as high quality jackets, shoes and trainers – and are perfectly genuine, an online store selling only one brand can also be a sign that a counterfeiter is using that website to offload fake goods, so be doubly careful.
2.    Look at the details – detailing can often separate real goods from fake ones. On brand T-shirts, for example, look at what the company in question describes as its ‘signature’ or ‘classic’ styling, such as where brand labels are located, stitching styles and cut. Often, even online, you can see where a picture of the goods doesn’t match up to the company’s signature style, such as a garment looking skinny when the cut is supposed to relaxed or roomy, or a label being slightly different in colour, size or shape. Counterfeiters can produce garments that are almost identical to the real thing, but most are just trying to sell similar looking garments as quickly as possible and don’t pay as much attention to detail so you can catch them out by examining photographs carefully.
3.    Ask for references – all good online shops have references and testimonials, but counterfeiters have become good at faking those too! Try googling the company and seeing what comes up: disappointed buyers often vent their fury on consumer sites or in online forums, while satisfied customers of online shops will also tend to enthuse about the good quality of their clothing, the excellence of the service and the speedy delivery. Use these online clues to help you decide where it’s safe to buy.

Why not do a lot of your Christmas shopping online this year? You can grab some bargains as well as making your friends and family happy, and with the time you save trawling around the shops you can put your feet up and have some ‘me’ time.

While money is still tight and the recession still looms over us like a big black cloud, buying clothing online for family and friends is a brilliant idea for Xmas.

Why not get your allotment-loving father, or rugby-mad son a quality, comfortable fleece? You can choose one with sleeves for the man who spends all winter outdoors walking the dog or digging up his garden, while the sleeveless variety is great for standing on the touchline, especially if you’re hoping to be asked to play, as it keeps the core muscles warm while allowing plenty of body movement during the warm-up while you wait to be called onto the pitch.

If you’ve ever worried that your fashion mad daughter or wife doesn’t dress properly for the winter, then buy them a really good winter jacket, one that’s designed for performance, but also has enough style to be fashionable. Look out for the latest hoodies, which are incredibly popular with younger women and that are warm and comfortable enough for a winter walk or a few hours spent wandering around the High Street looking at the New Year Sales.

While you might not think young children would welcome clothing, if you get them all a nice plain white T-shirt or sweatshirt, and some fabric pens so that they can spend Christmas afternoon ‘designing’ their own clothing – it’ll give the grown-ups a bit of peace and quiet, allow the children to express their creativity and – who knows – you might find you’ve got the next Banksy or Armani in the family!

All these gifts can be purchased from polo-shirts.co.uk – they’ll be delivered to your door and you can stop worrying about Christmas before most people have even started.

At polo-shirts.co.uk we strive to please our customers, and we invite everyone who purchases from us to give us feedback that will help us improve our customer service. We’re delighted with our latest google rating – which is measured entirely independently – which tells us that we’ve achieved 4.8 out of 5 from our Google checkout users.

Of course we already knew that we were giving people what they wanted, at prices they valued, with service that exceeded their expectations, because our customers told us so in the comments they left for us on our comments page but it’s great to have an outside confirmation that we’re meeting our aims.

And we’re not taking our success lightly, we intend to continue improving our offering and our service so that everybody who buys from us continues to be as happy as our past customers have been.

Internet shopping has always suited men: it’s solitary, it involves technology, you can do it with food, drink or a cigarette in your hand and you don’t have to hang around outside waiting rooms while your girlfriend fights her way into something she’s going to ask your opinion on.  And this happiness to shop from a computer has led to men outshopping women online for the first time, in the first quarter of 2008.

Internet clothing sales are booming: 36% of consumers who have internet access purchased clothes, footwear or accessories online in the last quarter of 2007, almost double the figure two years ago – making fashion second only to books as the most popular internet purchase.  Shopping online works for men, because they get to play with technology: mouse and screen etc, and can do price comparison processes which are a large part of any male purchase. It’s only good, in the male mind, if you pay the most, or the least, for something, and never good if you actually have to traipse around the shops to find the cheapest!

Also, as every fashion-conscious wife knows, once a man finds a clothing item he really likes, he will tend to buy it over and over again and the internet is the perfect tool for that – he knows the size, he knows the colour and he knows he wants it delivered so there’s nothing left to do but click the mouse!  But where is the new growth in garment retailing online coming from?  Well, it’s the men who are interested in fashion, or at least in looking good, but who don’t live  in a major city. Designer brands, unusual sizes and personalised clothing like monograms or tailoring the cut have all made internet fashion into a great resource for men.

Male fashion courtesy of defrost.ca