The Tiniest Online Store on the Net Won’t Be Getting My Business

Wings of a Scent

Soap. Almost all of uses it for something. I like handmade soaps and go scouting around for different places that offer neat, different kinds of soap for the body, hands, or whatever. It’s part of my “collect everything” collection. Anyway, I found Wings of a Scent as I do so many websites — by accident. I was just surfing around and up the site popped and caught my interest. In a strange way…

What the Site Sells

Soap. Soap. Soap. Eggs and Soap. Ok, no eggs. But soap. And just two kinds. They offer — get this — TWO items on this website. Two items in total. Not two items in different scents and sizes. Just two items. I couldn’t get over that.

Navigation

There really isn’t any! The site is one page and just takes up a small corner of that page. It has two items — A 10-12 oz Wild Rose Soap and a 10-12 oz Wyoming Lilac soap.

They do have a small banner proclaiming two more soaps are on their way — Warm Vanilla and Honeysuckle.

The only other link is a “Contact Link” where you can email questions or comments to the site owner(s).

Once you make the difficult choice between the two soaps (there are no ingredients lists and a few word description for each, nothing more), it goes directly into a paypal shopping cart. You choose quantity and then check out.

You don’t know until you get to the paypal page and sign in what the shipping costs are and there is nothing on the site to indicate such.

From my tests, it looks like one bar of soap is $2.80 to ship, two is $4.80, and it goes up that way as you add more bars of soap to your cart.

You go to your paypal count, log in, and pay. From there, you wait and see what comes.

My Experience

I love handmade soaps and these sounded lovely but there was no way I was going to order from a site with no info, no ingredients, no…anything.

But my sister did. She was intrigued by the idea of the Wyoming Lilac Soap, her (and my) favorite spring scent.

She paid through Paypal and got only her Paypal confirmation of payment as a receipt. Three weeks later she did receive a bar of soap in a brown envelope. Inside was a chunk of light purple soap that smelled heavenly. It was wrapped in clear cellophane with a rough hand made label. She cut it into two chunks and gave me one.

The soap was quite nice. It lathered well and smelled beautiful. But…it was just soap. It was, indeed, handmade, roughly cut and fragrant. Still, I don’t see any advantage of this tiny website over any other one that sells handmade soaps.

I certainly would not chance ordering from them with no info at all on the site, no customer service number, and no idea what I am getting. Interested parties can email the site owner and ask questions and I do encourage you to do that if you are interested in ordering from this site. Perhaps you can get an ingredients list or some other info to help you make a decision about buying from this site.

Shipping and Returns

This is another one of those “Guess Our Policies” websites where there are no shipping costs posted and no return policy. I assume you cannot return items.

Conclusion

Boy, this is tough one to rate. The site sells only two items. It gives no info on those two items and has no disclosure about shipping, returns, or even ingredients. The shipping cost is average for 10-12 ounces of soap. The wait time was incredibly long to the point of believing it would never arrive. The soap itself is classic handmade soap. It’s very fragrant and lathers nicely. It melts easily like most handmade soaps with no preservatives. I don’t really have any problems with the quality of the soap except the price is a little steep.

But can I recommend that you shop at this site even knowing that the item did arrive and is nice? No. I believe there are many websites out there that sell handmade soaps, have a more professional outlook, and give you the information you need to make an educated decision about whether to buy from them or not.

This is the smallest, both in size of the site itself and in variety of items sold, website I have ever seen. While the quality of the soap is on par with other handmade soaps, I have to give this a generous 2 star rating for not going any info and leaving consumers in the dark as to what they are getting and when (or if!).

Recommended:

No

–P. Therre