A search result ends at somebody else's website. Snagfit finds the garment and hands you to the retailer's own page, and everything that decides whether the purchase goes well is on that page.
Most of it takes under two minutes to read, and skipping it is how people end up with a parcel they cannot return.
Is the item actually in stock in your size?
Check this first, because everything else is wasted if it is not.
A product listing stays live and indexed after individual sizes sell out, and sometimes after the whole item does. Shopping search data is built from listing feeds that can be minutes or hours behind the shop itself, so a result can be accurate about the garment and out of date about availability.
The retailer's page is the current truth. Select your size and see whether the button changes to "out of stock" or "notify me". On some sites the sold-out sizes are greyed out, on others they are simply missing from the list, which is easy to miss if you do not know your size is meant to be there.
If it is sold out, that is not necessarily the end. Finding a piece that has sold out is its own problem with its own approaches.
What does the composition actually tell you?
More than the photograph can, and it is the check people skip most.
The fabric composition is the list of fibres and percentages, printed on every legitimate listing. It tells you how the garment will behave: whether it will hold its shape, whether it will pill, how it washes, how warm it is, whether it will stretch out at the knees.
Two garments that look identical in a picture can be 100 percent merino and 100 percent acrylic. They photograph the same and they live completely different lives. This is the reason a knitwear search can return a wide price range for what looks like one jumper, as the post on finding knitwear goes into.
It is also the fastest way to work out whether a low price is a genuine markdown or a different product. A cheap cashmere jumper that turns out to be 5 percent cashmere and 95 percent something else is a correctly priced acrylic jumper wearing a cashmere name.
Why read the measurements instead of the size?
Because size labels are not standardised, between brands or between countries.
A size 10 in one brand is a 12 in another. A European 38 is not reliably a UK 10. Numeric sizing, letter sizing and measurement sizing all coexist and none of them agree. Two garments in your usual size from two shops can differ by several centimetres across the chest.
Most listings publish flat measurements per size, usually in centimetres, sometimes as garment measurements and sometimes as body measurements. Those two are not the same thing and the listing should say which it is.
The reliable method is to measure a garment you already own and like, then compare. That works across brands, across countries and across the years, and it takes one tape measure and two minutes. The guide on measuring yourself and the one on reading a size chart cover the details.
What is worth knowing about returns?
Four things, and they are usually not on the product page.
The window. How many days from delivery, and whether it counts from dispatch or from arrival. Fourteen and thirty are both common.
Who pays the postage. A free return and a paid return are different products. On a cheap garment, paid return postage to an overseas address can cost more than the item, which makes the return policy theoretical.
Whether sale items are excluded. Plenty of shops accept returns on full-price stock and not on markdowns, and the garment you found through a search is more likely than average to be a markdown.
Where the return goes. A shop with a local address and a shop that ships from overseas can look identical on the product page and differ completely on the return.
All of this is normally on a linked policy page. Opening it is thirty seconds.
How do you check the delivery terms?
Two numbers and one risk.
The two numbers are how long it takes and what it costs. Both are usually stated, though sometimes only at checkout, and both vary by destination in ways the product page does not show.
The risk is import charges. An item shipped across a customs border can attract duty and tax on arrival, collected by the courier along with a handling fee, and none of that appears in the price you saw. Whether it applies depends on where the item ships from, where you are, and the value. Some retailers quote a delivered price that includes it and say so. Others do not.
If a shop does not state where it ships from, that is worth noticing. It is one of the signals in how to tell if an online store is legit, alongside the contact details and the returns address.
Are you reading the price in your own currency?
Check the currency code rather than the symbol.
A dollar sign covers the US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong dollars, among others, and those are meaningfully different amounts. A listing showing 40 dollars can be a range of real prices depending on which dollar it is.
Many shops also detect your location and display a converted price without changing the underlying one, so the amount charged to your card can differ from the number on screen once the card issuer applies its own rate and any foreign transaction fee.
The checkout page states the actual charge, in the actual currency, and it is the only number that is definitely right. If a price matters to you, get to that page before deciding.
This is one of the reasons the same garment shows different prices in different results, which why the same item has different prices covers in full.
Who is actually selling it?
On a marketplace, the storefront and the seller are different things.
A large marketplace hosts thousands of independent sellers under one brand, and the protections, the returns and the dispatch times are often the seller's rather than the platform's. The seller name is usually on the product page in small type near the price or the delivery information.
What to look for: how long they have been trading, their feedback if the platform shows it, whether they are the brand themselves or a reseller, and where they ship from. A garment sold by the brand's own storefront and the same garment sold by a third party are two different purchases.
On a standalone shop, the equivalent check is whether the shop is who it says it is: a real address, a real contact route, a company name somewhere on the site.
Do the photos look like the seller's own stock?
This one catches a specific kind of problem.
A genuine listing normally has several photographs of the same garment: on a model, flat, from behind, a close-up of the fabric. They look like they were taken in one session with one camera.
A listing with a single glossy image and no alternates, particularly a brand campaign photograph on a shop you have never heard of, often means the seller has taken someone else's picture rather than photographing their own stock. What arrives may not be what is in the image.
The related sign is a photo set that does not match itself: one image on a white studio background, one outdoors, one obviously a different garment in a different colour. That usually means the images were collected rather than shot.
What if the price is much lower than everywhere else?
Look again rather than walking away, because a low price has several innocent explanations and a few that are not.
Innocent: an end-of-season markdown, an odd size run left over, a shop clearing stock, a genuinely cheaper retailer.
Less innocent: a different composition sold under a similar name, a grey-market seller with no warranty or returns, or a counterfeit.
The three checks that separate them are the ones above: read the composition, read the seller name, look at the photo set. A low price with a full specification and a proper set of photographs is usually a real markdown. What a dupe actually is covers the line between a legitimate lookalike and a counterfeit, which is worth knowing before you decide.
Snagfit takes no payment and hosts no checkout. The garment, the price, the terms and the parcel are all the retailer's, and reading their page is the part of this that no search can do for you.