Technology has had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our daily lives, especially on how we shop. Over the past decade, the percentage of sales through e-commerce channels has consistently grown by double digits each year, and this trend is not slowing down, according to eMarketer.
The online shopping landscape is expanding beyond retail goods like clothing and household items. Consumers are increasingly using the internet to purchase necessities, including eyewear.
In fact, the Vision Council Market Research team found that online sales of glasses and contacts reached 3.5 billion in 2020. For many people with straightforward optical needs, some new at-home services let you safely order prescription glasses without a trip to an optician or even an eye doctor.
There is a definite shift in people’s preference towards shopping online and a number of reasons are prompting them to bend towards this shift.
Some of the main reasons include:
Convenience of Shopping Online
Online shopping is all about convenience. Online shopping gives consumers control over when and where they can shop. Shoppers enjoy the fact that online shopping presents them with a wide choice of options and that it makes shopping from the comfort of their home possible. Shopping for prescription glasses and other eyewear products is also possible now owing to the mushrooming of several online eyewear retail stores.
With the rise of mobile-friendly websites and applications, it’s easier than ever for people to order and receive eyewear without making a trip to an eye care professional. Through online channels, all consumers need to do is upload their prescription and they can choose from thousands of different brands and styles of frames. For contact lenses, there are even options to automatically reship them at predetermined intervals.
With products like contact lenses and glasses that are used daily but need to be replaced regularly (especially contact lenses), online shopping is a convenient way to receive eyewear when consumers need it.
Customer Reviews Help Make Informed Decisions
A major benefit of shopping online is the option to read reviews from real people who have already bought and tried the products that shoppers are interested in. Some consumers may be hesitant to purchase a product like glasses or contact lenses online because they can’t see them in-person before purchase. But online reviews can help ease their worry about the quality of the product.
In fact, Qualtrics found that online reviews influence the purchase decisions for at least 93% of the shoppers. Customers use this information to compare product quality and value to determine if they should continue with their purchase.
The same is true for eyewear. Consumers trust online reviews and rely on them to help with their purchasing decisions.
Lower Prices and Better Discounts
Online stores offer better discounts and lower prices of products. They are able to do this because they save on the overhead costs of running a store like rent, electricity bills, staff salaries, etc.
Physical brick and mortar stores cannot compete with these prices or inventory. A physical store can showcase only a limited number of eyewear products. However, an online store can have unlimited inventory – and thus an unlimited range of eyewear to choose from.
Magento Powered Online Eyewear Store
Magento empowers a number of small-size, mid-size, and enterprise level businesses to benefit from the robust e-commerce platform. Magento allows a number of extensions that can help a business owner not only personalise and give a brand personality to his store, but also enable a number of functions that will assist users and shoppers and make their shopping experience better.
Magento Module eye prescription model is a versatile content management solution that empowers users with a mobile-friendly configuration and plenty of built-in features that make the store easy to manage.
Prescription Lens Configuration Magento 2 Extension
Prescription lens configurator Magento 2 extension is a powerful extension that assists shoppers in online purchase of eye contact lens type products based on the choice of power, cylinder, axis, base curve & diameter of both the eyes of the customer – which are pre-created fields in the extension.
It is a complete solution for an online store selling eyewear and lenses. It has in-built functionality that helps display pre-configured options for fields of lens type products.
Magento 2 lenses prescription extension provides features to create & manage custom lens product options – which are ideal for online stores selling prescription glasses. Most online e-commerce stores face the issue of not being able handle the minute configurations required in an online eyewear store efficiently.
In most cast cases, either the customer gets a wrong product or simply loses patience when he finds the service at the store below standards and jumps to another website or store. This isn’t a good sign for an e-commerce business. The Magento 2 contact lens prescription module easily bridges the gap that shoppers feel on an online store for eyewear by reducing the complexities and thus improving the shopping experience.
The Magento eye prescription extension gives store owners a built-in ready to use structure to build a website around complete with necessary fields that shoppers need to fill their unique answers in. These include the product types for which business owners want the customized configuration, base curve, diameter, power, and additional fields. Store admin can configure the values & add the relevant fields for either eye.
Magento2 prescription extension offers unique features to an online eyewear platform that would otherwise be impossible with default Magento2 settings. This makes it possible to create various attributes that can go a long way in making an online eyewear retail store function better such as set lenses, display two products at the same product page, and do a lot more with ease.
At the same time, it allows users to start creating attribute ‘set lenses’ and some common lenses attributes like Lens Radius, Lens Diameter, Power, etc or display two products on the single page. This enables visitors on the website to compare products by keeping them side-by-side and evaluating both. Prescription eyewear online store owners can, thus, do a lot more with Prescription Lens Configurator Magento2 Extension.
Magento Eye Prescription Extensionand the Magento 2 Contact lens Prescriptionextension are here to make online Magento-based eyewear stores better and more convenient to use for shoppers. By incorporating these, a store owner can ensure that the visitors to his e-commerce store have a pleasant and a much better experience while shopping. This goes a long way in helping store owners attract and build a loyal customer base and generate repeat sales.
Online shoppers also prefer to go back to the stores that made shopping experience much simpler for them and took care of their needs in terms of fields that they felt were necessary to be mentioned and paid attention to when placing orders.
These extensions are very simple to incorporate and have a profound impact on an online eyewear store in terms of usability and ease of operation. The competition in the domain of online eyewear stores is increasing day by day. Adding unique and consumer-friendly features that improve the ease of shopping on a store greatly impact the surge in number of people visiting and becoming loyal customers of a store.
