Where To Find The Best Contact Lens Prices Online

Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index has been created to show which website has the best contact lens prices online.

Since 2015, I have been comparing contact lens prices across all the major contact lens websites. What I learned is that there is no single best site for every brand.

There are sites that have the lowest price for a few brands, but over-charge for all other brands, and there are sites that simply don't have the lowest price for any brand. It is impossible to point to a single site that offers the best contact lens prices online for every single brand.

Nevertheless, I think it is useful for contact lens consumers to know where they are most likely to find the best price for their contact lenses. That is why I have developed Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index.

Price notice: The website rankings and price index figures in this article are from October 4th, 2017 and may no longer reflect current pricing. Prices change frequently. For today's lowest prices, compare contact lens prices here.

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Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index compares all the top contact lens websites to each other and assigns each website a number which represents how good that website's prices are on average.

How Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index is Calculated

The idea behind the calculations was to add up the price of every contact lens brand for each website and compare the totals to each other.

By comparing the totals of every website, we can get an idea of how much they all charge relative to each other.

However, this cannot easily be done as some websites sell certain brands that other websites don't sell. The brands that are not sold on every single website would skew the results unfairly in the comparison.

To address this problem, I excluded any brand that wasn't sold at each of the 12 websites in the comparison from the calculations. In other words, the calculations only take into account the contact lens brands that can be purchased at any of the following websites:

• Coastal
• 1-800 Contacts
• Discount Contact Lenses
• Contacts Direct
• Walmart Contacts
• Lens
• Contact Lens King
• Walgreens
• ACLens
• Lens Direct
• PSContacts
• EzContacts

Once I calculated the combined price of every single brand at each of the websites listed above, I divided every site total by the total of the site with the lowest one.

This results in the website with the lowest average prices having an index of 1. Every other site has an index higher than 1, and the higher the index, the higher the prices are on average for that site.

You can look at the index number for any site as the number of times more expensive they are on average compared to the website with the lowest average prices.

For example, if a website has an index of 1.2, their prices are on average 1.2× higher than the site with an index of 1. If the index is 1.5, the prices are on average 1.5× as high as the site with the lowest prices, an index of 2 would mean 2× higher, and so on.

The figures used to calculate the following rankings were all taken from the price checks I performed on October 4th, 2017.

Based on this analysis, Lens.com had the lowest overall price index, meaning that the best contact lens prices online were most likely to be found at that website at that time.

ACLens and PSContacts also had pretty good prices, averaging about 1.1× more expensive than Lens.com.

Discount Contact Lenses and Contact Lens King were the next two best bets, averaging around 1.2× more expensive than Lens.com.

EzContacts, Coastal, Walmart Contacts and Lens Direct were all mid-range, averaging between 1.3–1.4× more expensive than Lens.com.

1800 Contacts and Walgreens were the most expensive websites to buy contact lenses from. On average, they were 1.7× more expensive than Lens.com.

What The Index Does Not Tell You

Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index does not give you any information about the price for any one specific brand.

If you are looking for the site that has the lowest price for your brand of contact lenses, consult Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Price Comparison chart.

It is possible that the website with the index of 1 is NOT the website that has the lowest price for your brand, and vice versa. A website with an index of 2 COULD have the lowest price for your brand, it's just not as likely. But the only way to know is to check.

Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index also does not take into account shipping costs and processing fees. Some websites charge these fees while others don't. This could play a small role in the overall results.

What The Index Does Tell You

What Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Website Price Index does tell you is which site has the best contact lens prices online overall.

I created this Index because there is a perception among many contact lens wearers that the prices for contact lenses online are all the same.

This index shows, in as clear a way as possible, that contact lens websites not only have different prices, but vastly different prices in many cases.

For example, one of the most common misconceptions among contact lens wearers is that 1-800 Contacts offers really low prices on contact lenses. In reality, 1-800 Contacts is among the most expensive places to buy contact lenses online.

I would recommend that anyone who purchases contact lenses online, or is considering doing so, consult the Contact Lens Website Price Index. If the site they have traditionally purchased their contact lenses from (or is considering ordering from) isn't among those with the lowest index, I would advise considering switching sites.

Find The Lowest Price For Your Brand

To make sure you always get the lowest price for your brand of contact lenses, always consult Contacts Advice's Contact Lens Price Comparison chart. I perform price checks across more than 50 brands at multiple websites regularly to make sure I uncover where the lowest price for every brand can be found.