The Challenge of Buying Eyeglasses Online

Buying eyeglasses requires such an attention to detail and incurs such a cost that buying online may not seem like a good idea.  You need the lenses to not only have a certain strength, but certain additional features (such as tinting and bifocal lenses), and most of all you need to make sure they fit your face while allowing you to see comfortably.

If in a store, you can address any correctible flaws with the salesperson immediately and the correct adjustments can be made or ordered on the spot.  When you buy your glasses online, however, you don't have that luxury.  If the lenses have any problems, you have to ship them back and try to explain to an online or telephone representative who cannot see the lenses what the problem is.  And on top of being the only point of reference... you're not an optometrist, which may cause problems with accurately describing the needed corrections.

Most buy their glasses in the same place where they received their eye exam, as that makes it easier to ensure everyone, optometrist and eyeglass lab, are on the same page and you get the correct lenses.  One of the challenges of buying online, as with buying lenses in a different place from where you got your eye exam, is that you now have to communicate between different voices in different places, increasing the challenge of getting everyone on the same page if problems occur.  If there's a problem with lenses that you ordered and you need optometrist input on the needed corrections, you now need to communicate separately with the optometrist, then report back to the vendor and hope that you don't obscure any needed details from the optometrist.

That said, if you feel comfortable enough with optometry terminology and have enough experience in handling your prescriptions on your own, ordering online may be the way to go as doing so can save you money.  You're not a captive audience to an optometrist's eyeglass dealer, nor do you need to deal with a brick and mortar eyeglass store that has to sell their products at a markup.  Ordering online gives you more purchasing options and can save you additional money over a brick and mortar store, even with shipping charges.