How to Start Online Eyewear and Prescription Glasses Business

The eyewear industry has been one of the fast growing industries thanks to an increase in online shopping. The convenience of e-commerce platforms is causing more and more people to buy their eyeglasses. They like the convenience of shopping a wide variety in frames and lenses online from home, as well as having their picks personalized. 

Whether it is the classic prescription glasses or fashionable sunglasses, an online market has a varied range of products for all its customers. This has created an extremely lucrative market in the range of eyewear and subsequently, a whole new portal for young entrepreneurs. 

In this guide, we will go over all you need to know from planning your business properly to having a very comfortable UI/UX type of website so users can shop peacefully.

1. Creating an Eyewear Business Plan

Drafting a profitable optical business plan is an opportunity as well as a knotty task. Firstly, market research is the first and most critical step. Part of your preparation is knowing who you are going to sell your frames, and that means learning more about what kind of eyewear do they like buying?

Also be ready with analysis of what is your competitors not coming ahead in the market for it, and their pricing strategy, where do they stand now compared to you,and all about customer service. You need this information for an appropriate way to position your business and USP (unique selling points).

After determining the market landscape, sketch out your budget and plan economically upfront. This plan should explain all potential expenditures including, but not limited to, sourcing product costs; and marketing efforts & other expected operational expenses.

Proper budgeting should provide you the right amount of money for sustaining your business, handling unexpected expenses. Moreover, make a comprehensive financial forecast telling you what your revenue will be as well as the profit margins and break-even analysis giving you clues about when to invest or cut back on investments.

Choosing a good quality supplier is another big part of your business plan. Spend time researching your potential suppliers to make sure they only do products that meet the standard you need and are able to deliver on time.  Establishing strong relationships with reliable suppliers will help maintain the quality of your products and ensure consistent availability.

Finally, you need a good customer service plan if you want to establish trust and recurring loyalty with your customers. It must describe what happens when someone returns a product or exchanges, how customer inquiries are handled… The best thing about customer service is not just resolving the issues with a client but also improving customers loyalty and return business.

On the surface, it may not seem like your customer service strategy has to do much with selling glasses or contact lenses — but a thought-out and well-executable policy will be able to help you navigate around these expectations appropriately; setting up an amazing image for your brand in this tough eyewear market.

2. Understanding the Global Eyewear Market

It is crucial to understand this step in the whole process. Building an eyewear store is not a cakewalk. The first thing you need to do is conduct thorough market research.

According to The Vision magazine, around 42% of males and more than 50% of females in the world are wearing glasses. And the study shows that more than 70% of the planet will need some sort of eye correction due to the time spent on screens.

In 2018, the eyewear business was worth a 131billion USD. And it’s estimated to jump to 250 billion USD by 2025. From the stats, we can see that the US and EU are the world’s largest markets for eyewear stores. But recently, the Asia Pacific region is moving ahead with a sharp growth rate of 13% in this domain.

3. How to Choose Right Eyewear Products

The products you decide on are crucial to your success with an online optical store. The first thing you should do is to take a look at the current trends in eyewear fashion so that your own are fresh and desirable. For example, the rise in consumer awareness around sustainability has opened up a market for eco-friendly materials; increased screen time is driving interest in blue light-blocking glasses. Retro styles holding strong in response to the bell of fashion-savvy customers.

Getting a wide variety of merchandise out is not the solution. Prescription glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses cater to a large variety of customer needs. This variety makes it appealing not just to a broader audience but also serves as an incentive for repeat purchases.

For this reason, always try to work with trusted suppliers that have the best products and services. Teaming up with reputable well-known brands or manufacturers is vital when it comes to delivering premium product quality — a key ingredient in winning your client trust and faith.

It is also important to offer a range of budget brackets. Offer a range of pricing from affordable, daily wear eyeglasses to luxury frames. That you will be able to reach all types of customers (from those seeking low-budget solutions up until the ones that don’t mind paying for a premium solution).

This perfect combination of product variety and quality maintains a competitive pricing already, thereby allowing you to cater towards a broad audience, rendering your online optical store one great choice for anyone in need!

4. Legalize your Eyewear Business

Running your glasses business legally is the main thing to avoid potential legal problems. Getting the Right Business Licenses & Permits Depending on the laws in your country, it is crucial to check what licenses are required for this occupation. These licenses prove that your business is operating legally and prevents you from facing any troubles with the regulatory departments.

Furthermore, for effective management of your money you need a separate business banking account. This in turn allows a great view of the health and size of your business, because all income/expense checks process with this one account just as if it had been created for that purpose.

It also provides protection since it separates your business assets from your personal liabilities, which can save you a lot of hassle in reducing risks. That way, you lessen the risk of getting yourself in personal legal or financial trouble from your business.

Keeping informed on the constantly changing regulatory requirements and optical standards will enable you to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to offering your retail customers a high-quality range. If you do this on an ongoing basis it should help protect your business and stop you from tripping up into any legal pitfalls.

Taking steps to be proactively compliant will not only avoid your business from going down but also means you are more likely to gain trust and credibility with consumers and partners.

5. How to Choose the Right eCommerce Platform for Optical Business?

Selection of the right platform for your eyewear e-commerce store is one of the most critical and liable decisions you are gonna make that can affect or decide business success. It is pretty difficult to choose the best that suits your needs because of the availability of many options. Breaking down the key factors, which influences your decision by a qualified understanding.

Evaluate the scalability of ecommerce for online opticians— First Consequently, as your business grows in scale and scope, the e-commerce platform should be equipped to accommodate more traffic without decreasing its processing abilities. The more modest your requirements and the longer you intend on staying, focus on the features for simpler to scale planning capacities (i.e., adding products), larger inventory management or higher volume customer interaction.

But even before that, you have to consider how much ease-of-use does the Platform offer. This allows the store to operate smoothly and reduces the complexity of using it from a user interface perspective. Every moment you waste in configuring the dashboard is an expensive one and probably a headache too. This is very crucial especially when you are on your own without a proper IT team to manage the store for you.

Also, — and perhaps more important than all else— how customized they can be. Here are some of the concepts for optical store owners to mark themselves. Go with a platform that allows for customization in designs and features. That way you can tailor your store to look and behave not only the brand narrating it but also conforming all of them with what customers are anticipating when they move into.

Third party tool integrations are also crucial. The software that you pick should be able to integrate with different tools such as payment gateway, shipping provider, marketing services etc. It will enable you to automate carrier-grade services that simplify operations, increase customer experience and affect cost efficiency.

Additionally, you should also assess the platform supports and developer resources. Having a support system and being part of an active community can be beneficial in receiving help or troubleshooting advice. Find platforms with good customer support, extensive documentation and lots of other users on forums to help you solve any problems in use.

Checkout TheLens Store CaseStudy

The following are two best picks when it comes to starting an online eyewear store:

Method 1: Magento Supremacy

Magento is created to be a powerful open-source eCommerce package that gives users the ability to easily and quickly build fantastic online stores of any size. This improves its scalability and flexibility, making it great for both start-ups as well older brands. Magento is of great use especially for Lenskart who still prefers Magento to run its complex business processes and not just the same, but also companies like HP which top eCommerce lists.

For startups, Magento offers a powerful foundation for growth. Being an open-source software you will get a completely customized website that perfectly suits the need of your new business to have their unique brand identity. Startups benefit from Magento’s modular architecture, which supports a wide array of extensions and integrations.

For this reason, as your business develops and needs to add new features or scale the store (entry more traffic, deposit more product records), you will be able to do so with much more flexibility. The fact that Magento is scalable and its setup facilitates complex products as well as store views (in multiple languages) implemented from a single backend make it ideal for ambitious startups.

Magento is highly beneficial for well-established brands because of its robust functionalities and enterprise-level features. The platform is especially good at managing huge inventories and complicated catalogs, something very important for businesses with many products or large transaction count.

It offers coverage analytics and reporting capabilities that give a deep insight into customer behavior or sales performance, so established brands could leverage data to improvise their marketing techniques. Moreover, with Magento security features you can easily keep your customer data protected and it is fully capable of doing an assigned multi-store management that helps in different operations on a region basis or product lines.

It also works well with advanced personalization and segmentation strategies that improve customer engagement and loyalty. With its large community and marketplace, brands have access to thousands of resources & extensions that can be integrated to their online presence while keeping a brand’s persona the same yet innovative. With the platform offering SEO and marketing tools, which are all completely customizable to help attract customers more easily by driving natural search traffic while increasing visibility for both new or remaining brands.

SetuBridge offers a bulk of plugins/extensions for Magento, so that you can take benefits and advantages while using the Magento platform. One of the standout solutions is a Prescription Eye Lens extension that allows customers to enter details such as base curve, diameter and power. What this means is that your store will be able to match customers with precisely what was prescribed, making their whole shopping encounter better and building you a more efficient online business.

Magento can help you reach whatever your business goals are with its deep level of capabilities, and between our strategic paths implementation thousands stores before yours will be in place to reduce any unknowns at every turn whether starting new or looking to optimize an existing store.

Method 2: Shopify

You are not required to be a technology geek or have an IT person on board just for dealing with your Online eyewear store. It is something that shopify lets anyone manage on its own. Shopify offers a number of beautiful themes and makes it easy for you to brand your stuff onto the different pages.

Shopify makes it super easy and inexpensive for new startups to get up and sell online. Its simple interface and readymade themes let you start in a few minutes with no previous coding experience. Shopify comes with built-in tools to easily manage products, process orders and track sales wherever you choose! What is also good about it, its scalability then as your business will grow Shopify won’t force you to turn everything into something new.

To be fair, even established brands could use the robust features and flexibility that Shopify has to offer. It also has advanced third-party integrations with CRM systems, analytics and marketing automation. With its wide range of apps it has a marketplace to offer where there are thousands of applications which can improve the store functionality, customer engagements and operations. Shopify provides indispensable features that can be utilized by brands with a wide catalog or complex inventory requirements such as personalized product variants, advance on stock management and more.

Shopify is also very solid with good help/support, and security. With reliable hosting and 24/7 customer support, you can know your store is operating properly which makes the difference between a new business or one with high traffic. Additionally, the integrated SEO tools and marketing integrations Shopify offers can help market your store to generate traffic for returning customers – increasing traffic by improving visibility online.

Our team can provide services for your online glasses business from custom Shopify apps to solid and unique online stores. One of the most popular solutions we work on is the Prescription Eye Lenses Shopify App. The app allows clients to build lens-specific products, manage prescription-based orders and more — all leading to higher conversion rates and improved sales.

Feel free to contact us if you want a professional Shopify store setup and configuration. We are here to help you to build ecommerce for online opticians.

6. How to Build Eyewear Website?

Now, this is the most important part. All your onboarding, sales, conversions, etc will depend on your eyewear website.

Now, there are many aspects to building a website. But let’s start from zero.

If you’re just starting your business. Then you’ll need a robust website to deal with your products and shoppers. Now, to do this, people have two options:

• Do It Yourself

• Hire Pros

Do It Yourself

• Many store owners believe that their site should be their own creation. To do this, they simply form a developer team and start working on creating a website. Though the store owners have all the flexibility, it’s still hectic.

• They’ll have to learn everything and work with trial & error methods. It’s good for the long run, but starting would be very slow with a lot of amateur mistakes.

Hire Pros

•  If you want a flashy website built in a short period of time. Then this option is for you. Here people hire a company like SetuBridge which specializes in making websites that will be result-oriented. Specify your requirements and they will do the rest.

• The best part of hiring pros is that you don’t need to worry about anything.

7. How to Add a Payment Gateway to an Online Optical Store?

People are far more likely to abandon their shopping carts if they have too many hoops to jump through during checkout. To ensure that your potential shoppers become actual customers, it’s important that you make the checkout process as efficient and simple as possible.

One way to do this is to integrate payment gateways into your e-commerce website. Payment gateways allow you to accept debit and credit card payments from customers, with this information transferred securely from your website to the relevant bank account for processing.

A good payment gateway service will provide you with a reliable platform that ensures that your customer’s sensitive information is kept safe and secure, while also giving them a variety of different options for paying for goods or services on your site. This can include credit cards, debit cards, electronic checks (eChecks), PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay. Some even offer cryptocurrency payment options!

You’ll also want a service that offers you 24/7 support in case anything goes wrong during the checkout process. This will ensure that you can resolve any issues quickly and efficiently without losing any potential customers along the way.

8. How to Promote Online Eyewear Store?

When you create your own site, shoppers won’t come on their own to buy eyewear frames online. So you have to drive traffic, attract customers, and increase sales. Here are some effective ways to promote your online eyewear store:

Optimize Your Eyewear Store for SEO

This is where SEO optimization comes in — it ensures that your online eyewear store ranks well on search engine result pages. The first and most important step is researching keywords to understand what your audience is searching for when it comes to eyewear online.

Naturally use these keywords in your product descriptions, blog posts and landing pages. Make sure that it is optimized for your meta tags (title tag,meta description) page by page. Ensuring all photos (particularly product images) have descriptive alt text and file sizes can help in image optimization for faster site speed. The higher your site is in the search results, more of that traffic will be organic and you are likely to get a lot more conversions.

Social Media Marketing:

Leverage social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to improve your eyewear brand. These channels are critical to how companies attract and interact with their prospective customers.

Use different types of content on Facebook, such as posts, stories and live videos to advertise your eyewear. Post appealing photos and news regarding your offerings such as new arrivals, a review from customers, exclusive offers etc. The vast array of target advertising options Facebook offers helps ensure your promotions are viewed by those more likely to convert: based on interests, demographics and location.

Naturally, it’s Instagram where the visual steak excels even more. Feature hi-res photos and videos that display your eyewear in a way to design, style and features stand out. Employ interactive content via Stories and Reels in the form of polls or tutorials, as well as partner with influencers who can showcase your products to their followers. Instagram has the prime platform for building brand and engaging its users with such a visual-first strategy.

In Twitter, people view it as a quick interaction platform that locates time-bound tweets in one tweet(unit of content). Post any updates, promotions and industry news while engaging with your audience through replies and retweets. Use popular hashtags to get your posts seen and become part of appropriate threads. If you have an eyewear store, for instance, Twitter Ads can target users who are looking for the keyword “eyeglasses.”

Optimized with hashtags to improve discoverability and tie into larger conversations in eyewear/fashion. Utilize unique, branded hashtags for user-generated content that allows your customers to share their experience with the products and drives organic engagement within the community.

Influencer Marketing is where you team up with people who have a large number of followers in the field of fashion or eyewear. They endorse your content to a wider audience They add credibility and social proof around your products Driving targeted site traffic.

Opt for paid advertising on these platforms to maximize your reach and attract relevant customers at minimal expense. You can use tools like Facebook Ads Manager along with Instagram Promotions, where you can get more detailed retarget ads based on your strategy/form plan by running specific campaigns designed to measure the brand recall/value.

Utilization of social media will make it easier for your brand to be in the forefront, get involved with expected market messages and help generate region paying at an end point outlet so that more customers can stop by.

Email Marketing:

Email is a great tool to help keep your eyewear customers engaged. First and foremost, you need an email list of people that are interested in hearing from your store. This list should be your email marketing strategies.

Send newsletters on new product drops, discount offers, and exclusive sales. Subject lines and personalization: Capture attention with click-worthy subject lines. Fill your campaigns with personalized content to optimize open rates as much as possible! The basic template includes high-quality images of your latest eyewear collections, detailed descriptions and clear call to actions that can guide the reader back into your store.

The promotional email should be confined to the best available promotion or offer like promo codes, limited hourly discount offers, seasonal sale discounts, recurring buy-one-get one free-offers etc. These offers should be time-constrained which will make it more compelling for your subscribers and drive them to act straight away.

Nevertheless, with product updates your audience will never be kept in darkness as to what is fresh or restocked. This should be a post sharing fresh insights on what is trending in eyewear and how your new products meet what the modern consumer craves both in form and function.

Emails are personalized to provide customers an improved experience that takes into account their previous purchases and browsing habits. Send targeted recommendations to customers who have shown interest in different types of eyewear or remind bicycles-shopping web visitors about the specs they eyed last time.

They feel that abandoned cart emails recover significant lost sales and are effective in fetching them for returning back. Send automatic follow up messages to customers who add products to the cart but don’t complete their purchase with links to return back their cart and proceed with the transaction.

Reiterate customer satisfaction with follow-up emails. Thank them for their purchase, ask if there is anything else that you can help with and suggest additional purchases.

Email marketing allows you to interact with your prospective and existing customers directly, inform them about anything new in your store/offerings and draw users back for repeat business.

Customer Reviews and Referrals:

Leveraging customer satisfaction by using reviews and referrals is one of the most powerful ways to gain credibility for your eyewear store, attracting potential future customers. First and foremost, you want to actually tell satisfied customers they should be posting good reviews.

Send closeout email series or post-purchase surveys requesting feedback/reviews. Streamline it by linking straight to review platforms and consider rewarding customers with discounts on future purchases if they leave you some feedback.

Highlight positive customer reviews on your website to help customers feel more trust while also demonstrating what a great service or product you have. Showing testimonials and ratings may create an impact on potential buyers, that is why using them, helps in improving the recognition of your store

Referrals are also very handy in growing your customer base. Create a referral program — Offer your customers rewards for telling their friends and family about you. Provide rewards, such as discounts, gift cards or early access to the latest collections for both: referrer & new customer. Avoid a Complex Referral Format: Educate and Inspire User Activity through Streamlined Process.

Respond to customers who have reviewed by thanking them, and responding back if they provide feedback. This indicates that you value customer feedback and improves the likelihood others will provide their experiences too.

Utilize customer reviews and referrals to improve your store reputation, gain trust from potential buyers and create a loyal network of customers who spread the name for you in supporting your eyewear business.

Collaborations and Partnerships:

Strategic collaborations and partnerships can greatly help to improve the audience of your eyewear store. In order to leverage, you can seek partnership with other eyewear industry businesses. Some examples are optometrist, eye clinic, or complementary retailer wherein this would be a great opportunity for promotion of their product and services.

Contact your local optometrists or the ophthalmologist and do exclusives with their patients. This also helps to bring footfall in your store and creates trust as having these professionals use implies that even well known persons are also using this. Other opportunities include cross-promotions, where you promote each other’s products on social media or featured in a blog post and store displays.

You can also create partnerships with companies who are in sectors that compliment your récord, for example textile shops or health-centers to acquire new customers. You could open the door to partnering for joint events, or collaborating on package deals such as eyewear plus complementary products/services. This might offer some extra value to your customers and attract a wider audience.

Co-branding advertising campaigns or social media content are other ways you might consider to increase brand visibility. Together, you will expand your marketing reach by tapping into each others’ audiences and subject area expertise to find new customers who might not have found out about your store.

Strategically positioning and coming together with others businesses in your field (or otherwise) enables you to not only build high brand presence but also achieve a higher percentage of long-term profitable relationships.

Starting an online eyewear business is one thing; promoting it is another battle. In a fiercely competitive world, attracting an audience to your website requires unique promotions. These include Fixed Price Discounts, Volume Discounts, Offering Free Gifts, and more. For example, offer a case and cover for free with every eyewear purchase at your store. You can run a variety of discounts and free gift offers with Kite by Skai Lama. It’s free to use and has outstanding customer support with a 5 star rating.

9. Offer Excellent Customer Service

Great customer support is crucial for keeping your customers happy and turning them into loyal clients –especially in the eyewear business. You must offer top-notch support that caters to any post-purchase problem, and keeps relations with your customers amicable.

Providing a clear warranty and guarantee on your products is one of the basic features that customer service provides. It gives peace of mind to customers that their spectacles are assured for quality and sturdy. Your return and exchange policies should be clear, easily accessible to customers so that they could instantly return or cancel shipments. The capability is now to release both resources within a specific time window, which dramatically boosts consumer confidence and satisfaction.

Moreover, give recurring assistance in the form of servicing and follow-up to know whether your customer is satisfied or not. Taking a proactive step, like contacting your customers post-purchase to understand their feedback can help you recognize issues much earlier and fix the same if there are any. Establish a system for obtaining customer feedback to ensure continuous innovation in the creation of your products and services that is completely based on hands-on user reviews.

Offering promotions and discounts on repeat buys for existing customers can also be highly effective in terms of customer retention. Have a knowledgeable consultant team maybe if someone complains on your product and handle problems very well.

To wrap up, a great post-purchase support is more than just about what happens after you sold your product. Offer warranties, repairs and follow-ups also maintenance with regular promotions and have a responsive customer care team to keep up long-lasting business in the eyewear market.

10. Build your Network

Creating an extensive network is a must for your success in eyewear business. Your store may even miss out on great opportunities to gain visibility when there is not a solid network established. NetworkingNConnecting with industry professionals, customers and suppliers will all help to raise awareness of the store whilst boosting sales.

Begin by interacting with thought leaders and influencers to get your brand status on another level. Connect with Industry Key Players and Keep tabs on industry trends — Attend trade shows, conferences & networking events related to the business of eyewear. Not only will forging these relationships increase your network of connections but it can also lead to partnerships and collaborations that can broaden your reach.

Moreover, Work on customer relationships. And ask them to refer to your store and share their experiences. A happy customer can turn into a strong advocate of your brand by promoting our products and services.

Suppliers are another vital piece of your supply network. Keep in touch with them to make sure you get top-notch eyeglasses on a consistent basis. In addition, good supplier relationships mean you can have exclusive products and often prices which give your store the edge.

Do not rely on network effects but actively build and nurture your store for it to be more visible, attract customers as well as sales. It keeps you updated on industry trends- You can never achieve growth in the high-end eyewear market if your network chain is not developed properly.

Conclusion

Launching an online eyewear store may sound intimidating, but it can be done with the right plan in-place, tools and support around you. Each step is important in helping you understand the global market, optimize for SEO on your website and provide excellent customer service.

But worry not, SetuBridge has your back working with you through it all offering customized e-commerce solutions to take down what you envisioned. Are you ready to set out on your online eyewear business journey? Get in touch with us to know more about how we can help grow your online store.