Selling Glasses Online. Content for Static Pages

12 January 2015

When you choose to sell glasses online with LiveOptical you will get a powerful platform equipped with all necessary, and most importantly, easy to use tools to get your website selling fast with no sweat. Your LiveOptical webstore will be loaded with the digital catalog of the brands that you want to carry. So you don’t need to worry about entering all the products and SKU into the database. But the main content about your company and your selling policies you will have to write yourself. LiveOptical newly created stores will have a few sample pages for you to get started.

So what Static Pages should be? If you visit any e-commerce websites ex. futureshop.com or toysrus.com you will see that every website has at a minimum the following pages:

About Us
Contact
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

Most good websites in addition will have these pages:

  • Shipping Terms and Rates
  • Returns Policy
  • Cancellation Policy


FutureShop and ToysRUs don’t need advertising. Everyone knows about them. Any new website needs to have more static pages to create good content about their company to not only increase the Google rank, but also give site visitors confidence that you are a real company and selling authentic eyeglasses. Because you are selling eyeglasses, it would be a good idea to have pages on the following topics:

  • How to Order Lenses
  • Warranty Policy
  • Payment Information and Currency


So here is a bit about what each page should have.

About Us

In this page you should write a few paragraphs about your optical store operation. The city you are based and how many years you are in business. You can talk about the fact that you have licensed opticians on staff to answer any prescription questions and provide qualified service.

If you want, you can even include photo of your store and your employees.

Contact

This page should have an e-mail address at a minimum. It is a good idea to put your address and telephone number here.

Terms and Conditions

If you are talking about Shipping, Payment, Return policies on other pages, this page can simply have links to other pages. If you want to tell about all of this here, you can have a few sections describing these policies. Most of the time this page is a summary of all policies related to your online selling practice. As you start selling eyeglasses online with LiveOptical you may create some specific customer policies that make sense. For example you may find out that you don’t want to accept returns for prescription glasses or charge a fees for redo.

Privacy Policy

No one reads this page, but your payment provider may require you to have this. In short it talks about the fact that your website collects session cookies and all customer information will not be used for any other reason other than completing the sale. It will not be sold or shared with any other third party companies.

Shipping Terms and Rates

This will be the most visited page on your website by prospect customers. You can be very detailed here about your shipping practices or be very short. It is good idea to tell your customers that you are not responsible for lost mail. Because you are not a courier and can’t be responsible for their mistakes. If there is a loss of mail, you will assist your customers in opening a claim with the shipping company.

It is a great idea to list all your shipping fees and destinations here.

Returns Policy

This will be the second most visited page by your prospect customers after Shipping. Be clear about how many days people have before returning the eyeglasses and if there are any restocking fees. Be open about what can not be returned, ex. open contact lenses or prescription eyeglasses.

You need to tell your customers that they would have X days to return after receiving eyeglasses in the mail. This is different from the day order is placed.

You can make any other related rules, such as glasses can’t be worn or adjusted.

Cancellation Policy

When someone buys eyeglasses from your LiveOptical website, he knows that you need a few days to process the order. Customer may sometimes unfortunately change their mind. He may have found a same pair of eyeglasses elsewhere or for other reasons. But what happens if you already placed an order from the supplier? You will be stuck with that frame in your store. Cancellations are not common, but you may want to think of charging a cancellation fee to recoup some of your costs.  You may want to allow 24 hours free of charge and charge a fee afterwards. Or you may take a chance and not charge at all. Be clear about all scenarios.

How To Order Lenses

This is a very useful page if you decide to sell prescription eyeglasses on your website. You can take a screenshot of the lenses page and include it in this page. You can also include a link to the lenses page. Your licensed optician can help writing up a few paragraphs explaining to people where does Sphere go on the form and even what it is. It is great to have a few hand written examples of customer prescriptions to explain where to find all the prescription info. Many people are quite confused when they look at their prescription with zero understanding of what is cylinder and why it is on only one eye. What is OD and OS? And what is PD?

Warranty

It is common not to offer warranty for online glasses sales because it is not feasible in most cases. Customer has to ship you the eyeglasses and you still would need to pay for shipping to supplier. Warranty claims are rare for online purchases simply because customers themselves realize the complexity of the process. You can however take a chance and offer free one year warranty and charge customer for second shipping. Read your competition warranty policies and make one for your website. You can skip this page if you don’t offer warranty and simply answer all related questions via e-mail.

Payment Information and Currency

Whether you take PayPal or a credit card online purchasing is a bit different from POS. The main difference is the how credit card information is provided to you (via filling online credit card form). Most people don’t know that the credit card is tentatively charged the total amount. It is up to a merchant to actually take the money at a later date. So if you cancel the order in many cases you don’t even need to refund the credit card. All you need to do is not to take payment. But customers may be confused if they still see the charge on their online banking. This situation is the most common and many customers will be asking you why there is a charge when the order is cancelled. Or, why my credit card was not charged yet. This static page is the place to answer all these frequently asked questions.

If you collect PayPal only it would be useful to explain to your customers that they can pay with their credit card on your PayPal payment screen without having their own PayPal account. Many people don’t have PayPal account and would be glad to know this.