Selling Sunglasses Frame Online. Dealing With Customers.
Sunglasses online sales make the majority of online eyewear purchases. They are usually easier sell because they involve less customer interaction. We already talked about dealing with Rx glasses frames customers. With sunglasses there are fewer questions about the fitting, even about your policies or prices. Reason is because sunglasses online shoppers demographics is younger. These are usually people in their 20s-30s or even late teens. Young people are often best online customers because they have a lot of experience shopping online and have reasonable expectations from online stores. But sunglasses online shoppers still do have their needs. Their needs are different from Rx glasses frames shoppers.
Sunglasses online shoppers need more post-sales service. You, an optician or optometrist knows better than anyone that sunglasses go out of shape faster than Rx frames. Majority of sunglasses are made out of acetate and stretch more due to heat. So you will be getting questions about how these can be adjusted. There are many tutorials online about how this can be done at home with the hair dryers. You might want to think of making your own tutorial. You can film yourself on iPhone or any Smart Phone and post a video on YouTube and ship customer a link. Of take a few pictures to write a tutorial and post it to your static pages or News section of your LiveOptical store. LiveOptical makes it very easy to post videos, photos and text. Every time customer has such question, direct them to this page.
Take every opportunity to invite sunglasses customers to your walk-in store. They will be pleased with the option and may turn into walk-in customer one day. Remember, the whole idea why you opened an online optical store is to grow your business and build long-term relationships with your customers. When shipping them eyeglasses e-mail them about your walk-in location and services that you provide.
Since sunglasses scratch more due to natural wear and tear, your sunglasses customers may ask for warranty or replacement lenses. These requests are infrequent from our experience, but they do happen. Every time there is request like this – it’s an opportunity for you to make more money. Explain that warranty does not cover lenses scratches and offer to buy new lenses from you. Just like in your walk-in practice you can sell the original replacement lenses or stock lenses. Most of customers may not be able to install lenses into acetate frames themselves. Customers would need to mail you the frames. You can charge for shipping, lenses and even service. If it worth it customers will buy. If easier for them, they can walk-in for this. Don’t feel bad to turn away a customer like this since it may not be feasible to do replacement lenses over the Internet. If you don’t want to do that, just e-mail them and say that you don’t sell parts. You can offer a discount on the same sunglasses instead.
Prescription sunglasses currently make small amount of online glasses sales. There are many issues associated with Rx sunglasses such as matching tint, fitting etc. But again, many online customers are very agreeable. If you offer Rx sunglasses, you will definitely have more sales because less websites offer this. You can provide limited choices for colors. We recommend offering only three choices: solid grey, solid brown and match original. All LiveOptical websites have Rx sun lenses with these three options. You can modify the options yourself or create more similar SKUs based on our example.