Eyewear is a tricky business. It's expensive, serves both fashion and medical purposes, and has to be worn on one's face at all times. While eyewear does need to be sold in bricks-and-mortar stores so people can try it on and get second and third and fourth opinions and have it properly fitted and get adjustments when necessary, retailers could add so much value by having a useful, informative, interactive website that will help people do their initial research at home.
Seven steps to the perfect eyewear retailer's website:
1. Have a website, with hours and locations. Sounds obvious, but some stores don't.
2. List your prices for lenses and coatings, as well as the full terms and conditions of any deals you might have. I want to be able to walk into the store, look at a price tag, and mentally calculate what I'll have to pay. Come to think of it, list your prices for lenses and coatings in the store too! (And have price tags on the frames in stores too, *coughHAKIMcough*).
3. Show me your frames. All of them. Have an online catalogue like those online eyewear vendors do. You don't have to sell online, but show me pictures and prices. If the frames happen to come in different sizes and colours, tell me! I want to have the option of walking into the store with a list of style numbers, colours and sizes that I want to try on.
4. Let me search through your inventory effectively. With a click of the mouse, I want to be able to see all the oval frames, or all the oval wire frames, or all the oval wire frames with a lens size between 46 and 50 and a nose size 18 or 19. If there are only two frames in your inventory that meet my needs, let me find that out in 2 minutes on your website instead of by trekking all the way to The Big Mall and browsing through your entire inventory. Then, of course, show me which stores these specific frames are available at, and give me the option of having them sent to my local store for me to try on if they aren't there already. I know some chains' internal computer systems already allow store employees to do this. Now just make it available to the customer!
5. Have a price calculator on your website. I want to be able to enter the price of the frames and my lens requirements, and see how much I'll have to pay before I even leave the house. If you have promotions, set up the calculator that will automatically apply the best promotion to my purchase. For bonus points, have a reverse calculator, where I can enter my lens requirements, prescription, and the maximum I'm prepared to spend, and it tells me how much frame I can afford. For double bonus points, then let me select my frame preferences, and generate a list of the frames in that price range that match my preferences.
6. Let me enter my prescription too, so the computer can automatically exclude lens-frame combinations that are not compatible with my prescription. I would much rather find out that my hideously myopic left eye prevents me from ever being able to wear big frames before I get my heart too set on those big movie-star sunglasses that seem to be the fashion right now.
7. As an added bonus feature, set up a price-watch system, especially if you have ever-changing promotions. Let me enter my requirements (e.g. oval; wire-rimmed or frameless, amber, brown, bronze or tortoiseshell, single vision with anti-glare, plus a pair of sunglasses, oval, plastic, same prescription, all for under $X) and email me an alert when something like that becomes available. If I'm asking the impossible, give me a notice saying "The product combination you requested has never been available for less that $Y. Click here to proceed with this alert. Click here to modify your preferences."
I don't need to point out that the technology to do this already exists. Every online retailer works this way. Several online retailers have already applied this technology to selling glasses. If a bricks-and-mortar eyewear store picks up on this idea, and they will have my unquestioning loyalty. If I could do all the annoying preliminary browsing online, going to the store only to try frames on, show them to trusted friends for second opinions, and get properly fitted, I would not even consider going to a competing store that didn't have the online option.
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