Buying the correct size heel is a challenge when shopping online, but the task of getting the right heels for your foot size goes back well before the internet.
“If women would learn to buy shoes that fit properly, there would be few foot troubles,” famous shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo told Dorothy Roe in 1956. “No woman can be happy if her feet hurt,” he said.
After his death in 1960, Ferragamo’s nearly equally famous daughter Fiamma doubled down on this advice. “High heels don’t hurt us,” the then-19 year old told Elsa Barker in 1961. “It is the badly fitting shoes which ruin women’s feet.”
In modern times, there are three essential reasons that people buy shoes in the wrong size when shopping online.
Here’s what they are, and how to fix them.
1. Shop the correct size
The first reason that women buy the wrong shoe size when shopping for heels is that they shop the wrong size. Sound ridiculous? Bear with me.
Research has shown that somewhere between a third and a half of women think their shoe size is something other than what it actually is. In other words, many women simply have their shoe size wrong.
As the return rates for shoes bought online are about the same as the rate of women who have their size wrong, we could be forgiven for thinking that there’s a pretty strong correlation between size and satisfaction.
Of course that’s not the whole story. But we do know that shoe sizes change with age and life events (such as pregnancy), so if your size has been the same for as long as you remember it might be time to check that.
There have been lots of ingenious methods suggested for accurately measuring your feet for online shoe purchases, but none have gained traction. The best way to check your size is to go into some stores and try on a few different brands. You’ll work it out.
One more recent problem is that some women have shopped for heels that are bigger than their shoe size because they think this is a celebrity shoe hack to make their feet more comfortable. This is a bad idea as we’ve explained – it will only result in shoes that don’t fit properly.
2. Don’t second guess your shoe size on vague or generic information
The second reason why return rates are so high for heels bought online is that customers deviate from their correct size to “second guess” the manufacturer.
But the starting point should be that your shoemaker is trying to make your heels to the same size as your flats and other footwear. They’re not trying to trick you. All that would do is frustrate the customer and add return costs to the shoe designer.
Hence be careful of generic advice that says “always size up in heels from your ordinary size” or “always buy heels half a size smaller than your flats”.
Of course there are some shoe brands that are on another planet with their sizing all together whether it be flats or heels – Nike for a start – but there’s no reason to assume that you should always buy heels in a different size to your other shoes just because they’re heels.
The same caution should be applied if you’re sizing up or down just because you’ve read that a particular brand “runs small” or, less commonly, “runs large”.
It’s all very well to say that a brand “runs small” but the relevant question is “how small?” and that often differs substantially depending on the model of the shoe not just the brand. So before you consider sizing up or down, you should always read reviews for the particular heels in question.
Of course if large numbers of reviews say you need to go up or down a size (or half a size) then you should take that into consideration. But feet are very individual things, so be cautious about deviating from your normal size just because a handful of people said a particular heel was big or small to them.
3. Shop with your feet not your heart or purse
As for the final reason that women wear the wrong size heels? Unfortunately it is because they’ve chosen to grin and bear wearing a shoe that they know doesn’t fit.
This is perhaps because their real size is not available (something which happens a lot with sale heels) or perhaps because they don’t want the trouble of returning a shoe that doesn’t quite fit.
Or maybe their choice is to do with how the shoe is made or how it fits and nothing to do with size at all. Some heels just fit better on your feet than others.
As Carrie Bradshaw said, “These shoes pinch my feet, but I love them.” It’s difficult to find a way of arguing with that.