There are now more places than ever to buy contact lenses. If you combine both online and offline sources, you have no less than hundreds of different options. So how do you know what the best place to order contact lenses is?
Not in-store
If you’re wondering what the best place to order contact lenses is, right off the bat you can eliminate pretty much every physical store.
Not Your Eye Doctor’s Office
It will come to no surprise to you to learn that your eye doctor inflates the prices of contact lenses in order to turn a profit.
What you might not know is that with your contact lens prescription, regardless of where you get them from, you can get the exact same contact lenses that you would get from your eye doctor’s office.
So if you could get the exact same product, but at a much lower price, why wouldn’t you?
Not Other Brick-and-Mortor Contact Lens Retailers
So we know that your eye doctor over-charges for contact lenses, but what about other stores likes discount opticals and big box stores?
They might be able to cut you a slightly better deal than your optometrist, but the reality is that they are also just middle men between you and the contact lens manufacturers. And as we all know, middle men need to make a profit otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.
The bottom line on brick-and-mortor stores is that they have to jack up prices in order to cover costs of rent, building insurance, utilities, employees, etc., etc. And then they also take their cut, all of which leaves you paying much more than you need to.
If you don’t want to pay for all of those needless expenses, you have to start shopping for your contact lenses online.
Online is The Best Place to Order Contact Lenses
Price-wise, you can’t beat buying your contact lenses online. Online contact lens retailers are still middle between you and the contact lens manufacturers, but they don’t increase the price of contact lenses nearly as much as physical stores do.
How are they able to offer such low prices on contact lenses? It’s because operating a website is a lot less expensive than operating a brick-and-mortar business. There are fewer employees to pay, no rent, no building insurance, no utility bills, etc.
If you’ve never ordered contact lenses online before, you might have reservations about how to order them to make sure you get the right thing. Ordering contact lenses online is actually very simple, and made fool-proof in many ways. To learn more about how to order contact lenses online, click here.
Best Place to Order Contact Lenses Online
Here’s the issue with ordering contact lenses online: The internet is a giant place and it can be hard to weed out the good sites from the not-so-good sites.
Caution: Just because a website spends lots of money on advertising, doesn’t mean that they’re the best place to order contact lenses online.
In fact, for the vast majority of contact lens brands, the most well-known contact lens websites are not the cheapest!
The Real Issue
The real issue is where to buy cheap contact lenses online. The reality is that there is no single best place to buy contact lenses online for every single brand.
Some websites might have the lowest price for certain brands, but they will massively overcharge for other brands.
If you don’t know which website has the lowest price for the brand that you’re looking for, you might be paying as much as you would at your optometrist office (or more!).
The Solution
To avoid overpaying for your contact lenses, and only pay the absolutely lowest amount for your contact lenses, you must first consult a contact lens price comparison site.
A good contact lens price comparison site will price shop all the contact lens websites for you and tell you what site sells your brand for the lowest price.
Contacts Advice IS The Internet’s Best Contact Lens Price Comparison Site
Here at Contacts Advice, I personally do weekly price checks at the top contact lens websites for over 50 different brands of contact lenses.
That’s over 500 price checks per week to make sure that you pay as little as possible when it comes to ordering your contact lenses.
Finding the Lowest Price is Easy
1. Simply head over to Contacts Advice’s homepage
2. Scroll down until you find your brand of contact lenses (brands are organized by manufacturer, and a picture of the box is included for easy recognition)
3. Beside your brand, the lowest identified price is listed as well as a link to the website that has that price
How is Contacts Advice Different?
Other Contact Lens Price Comparison Websites |
Contacts Advice |
Only compares 3-4 sites | Compares 11 websites |
Rarey (if ever) update prices | Updates prices weekly |
Only compares select brands | Compares the top 50 most popular brands |
The contact lens industry is huge, and there are a lot of businesses trying to take advantage of people’s misconceptions about prices.
Never overpay for contact lenses again.
4 Responses
Meredith
I took your advice to visit to order my Toric contacts, but they charge shipping an handling. Not a good deal. Visiondirect never charged me shipping. The only reason I went there was because Walgreen’s site isn’t working for me to order contacts right now, which is a huge inconvenience. I hate visiondirect is gone and can’t even order right now from Walgreens. Guess I’ll keep waiting, but I do not like to pay shipping when spending over $100!
Julie
Hi Meredith! First of all I want to thank you so much for visiting my site and reading my article.
I’m surprised that Walgreens’ site isn’t working. They are a major online vendor. Whatever malfunction they are having is probably costing them a fortune in missed sales…
I hear you about the shipping and handling. My price comparisons only looks at the lowest advertised price, and that doesn’t take into account shipping and handling. I do however, have a good tip for you. At the bottom of the long table on my homepage that lists all the lowest prices, I always post a pdf of my latest complete price comparison chart that lists the prices of each brand across all the websites.
If the site that has the lowest price for your brand doesn’t have free shipping and handling, you can easily look up the site with the second lowest price and see if they have free shipping and handling. You will eventually find the most optimal combination of lowest ticketed price & shipping and handling fees.
Alternatively, if you leave me the name of your brand and how many boxes you’re looking to buy, I can quickly look up all the lowest total price (including shipping and processing fees) for you.
Also, I want to thank you for leaving your comment. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve my site to help contact lens wearers like you, I’d be happy to hear them :)
Sincerely,
Julie
Pratima
Just went to order Biofinity Toric and regular Biofinity lenses and your list has Lens.com as the best price but it’s actually discountcontactlens.com for right now at least. And it has free shipping. Thanks for the tip to comparison shop though – I’ve been blindly re-ordering from 1800 contacts for years because I just never realized that different sites had different prices for the same brands so thanks!
Julie
Hi Pratima!
I’m glad you started price shopping, 1800contacts is one of the sites with the highest prices! You will save a lot of money from now on!
As for the prices for Biofinity and Biofinity Toric, I’m curious to know what prices you’re seeing. I just double checked and on my browser and Lens.com has much lower prices than DiscountContactLenses.com.
Here is a screenshot of what I see:
I have had an issue with Lens.com prices appearing different on different browsers before. Even their own customer service agent didn’t know why that was happening, but they said they would honor the lower price.
If you can let me know what prices you see, that would be great :)
Thanks!