Should You Order Contact Lenses Online?
If you are an average person you most likely have heard that you can get anything from the internet. Usually the products online come with a lower price tag than at the regular stores because they simply have less expenses - they don't need to have a shop at a good location which usually costs a lot in the form of rent. Also they don't need that much staff in customer service because they can just line up the e-mails and let one person answer them all. Also having a physical store builds more expenses than just the rent - you have to decorate it etc. These are factors that usually bring down the costs for specific products when they are sold on the internet. Even though you can get cheap stuff online, should you always get it? Should you order contact lenses online?
You might think that ordering contact lenses online saves you a lot of money, and when you do a little bit searching you usually find that the prices are quite low. The most visible difference that you find with the online opticians is that they traditionally offer a larger variety of contacts than the regular stores around you. This is also a benefit that comes from not having a physical store - it doesn't take an space on the shelves to post a new product page on the website. Also the online sellers usually have a good selection of contacts from generic manufacturers that are considered as high quality as the ones that come from such as CIBA Vision, Airoptix and others, but since they are not branding their products and spending tens of thousands on advertising, they can keep their costs lower, and offer affordable contacts online.
Also most of the regular opticians don't want to take these products in their store because a lower price, means less money for them and that makes it harder to pay the rent, the electricity and the wages. The thing that they don't realize is that contact lenses ordering from the internet is actually an easier procedure than going to their shop. Since most of the people are nowadays familiar with using a web browser, they can just look at their prescription that they got from their eye doctor opthalmologist and order the correct diopter power and the optimal base curve for the lens. Just like in a normal store you can't try them on before you buy them, so there is no problem with that. With glasses you might want to see first how they fit your face, and how do they look on you.
What you should keep in mind when you are about to order contacts online is where you are ordering them from. First of all, you should remember that it is illegal to sell contacts without a prescription that is written by a registered doctor, preferrably a specialized optician. This only applies for US and for Canada, so if you find someone claiming to be located in the United States and still selling them without a prescription, you should avoid that store - they might have something fishy going on there. If the contacts are sent to you from some place else, and you are saving a lot of money, you can always measure the risks involved in ordering them overseas - you might not get the product but you might not lose that much money anyways. If you happen to find a reliable provider you can use them later and enjoy cheap contacts ordered online.
So every time you are ordering contacts, make sure that the seller is a legit company and don't claim to be something they aren't. Where can you get those non-prescription colored contacts then? Well the truth is that you still need to have some prescription to be certain about your eye size, but these are sold at most of the stores online also - and with a much wider selection.