The Importance of Your Online Reputation

Many moons ago I heard a piece on NPR about online eyeglass vendors. I have been wearing glasses since college and have always disliked the process of buying new glasses every time my prescription gets updated. First, I don't appreciate the pressure put on my by the optometrist to buy those glasses immediately from his/her retail store. This pressure comes in the form of withholding the written prescription until after I browse their selection. Second, I don't like the fact that the frames that actually look good on my face are ten to thirty times more expensive than the ugly ones, yet they use less plastic and metal in construction. According to Daniel Pinkwater, I finally have an option if I can only get my optometrist to give me both the written prescription and a number known as pupillary distance (the distance between the pupils of my eyes).

I did a great deal of homework because I had just filled my latest prescription and was about nine months away from visiting the eye doctor again. The Internet is full of debates and articles that are for and against buying prescription eyeglasses online, as well as articles that are just informative about the online retailers and how they are leveraging the Internet. I found that there were nine very popular companies and perhaps 25 smaller players, many of them overseas. Given that the big nine have had a great number of customers, they also had a large number of very vocal detractors. Some chose to confront the dissatisfied customers head-on by responding to the complaints wherever they were listed, while others simply ignored them. What did this tell me, as a potential customer, about what I should expect from these online vendors?

The big nine are rated and reviewed all over the Internet. Some examples that I found useful include:
39DollarGlasses
EyeBuyDirect
EyeglassDirect
GlassesShop
GlobalEyeglasses
Goggles4U
Optical4Less
SelectSpecs
ZenniOptical

There are also comments about or by some of the other vendors:
BestPriceGlasses
Discount-Eyeglasses

In the end, I chose to test three online vendors with inexpensive orders. I purchased glasses for my wife from EyeBuyDirect.com because she found a frame that she loved and they could make her prescription (her prescription is outside of many vendors' ranges). I purchased glasses for myself from Discount-Eyeglasses.net because they were the least inexpensive total package ($26 included shipping) and from BestPriceGlasses.com because they had the cheapest progressive lenses ($52.40 included shipping). Look for the actual transaction experiences and my opinion of the products in future blog entries.