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The best online eyeglasses on a budget: Zenni We’d prefer to see this alert earlier in the process. One flaw in Eyebuydirect’s ordering system - which most people might not find an issue, admittedly - is that it doesn’t flag multifocal prescriptions that are out of spec for a given frame until you’ve made your way through most of the ordering process (and the alert doesn’t give enough clear advice on what to do or what’s wrong). We don’t expect they’d fail in use or anything, but if you want a luxury feel you might not want to select the least expensive frames on offer here - Zenni has a slight edge here at the low end. While overall Eyebuydirect’s frames are of good quality and comparable to everything else in the under-$300 price range that we saw, some of the more basic plastic frames we checked out did feel a bit cheap by comparison with Zenni’s similarly priced frames.

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That said, you do get a full refund (unlike Zenni, where you get a 30-day window but only store credit), so if you don’t like their styles, you can easily recoup your investment and shop elsewhere. You have only 14 days to return your glasses if you don’t like them, among the shortest return periods of any online glasses retailer we looked at. If you’ve bought glasses in the past this is probably welcome (since there’s definitely a drawer full of excess cases somewhere in your house), but it can be a little inconvenient if you’re new to eyewear. Interestingly, and perhaps understandably given the need to keep down costs, you don’t get a case with your Eyebuydirect glasses - just a cardboard box.

With regular shipping, we got our glasses in nine business days. Two-day delivery (one day faster than even Zenni’s express service) is available for a select range of frames, with single-vision prescriptions - it’s about the cheapest way to get a pair of glasses in a hurry. Like most low-cost online retailers, Eyebuydirect doesn’t directly accept insurance, but the site provides a simple way of applying for reimbursement from a wide range of vision insurance plans, potentially saving you money even over other lower-cost online retailers, depending on your plan’s out-of-network coverage. A full-featured viewer works with your live webcam, an uploaded still image or a recorded video, and lets you enter your PD measurement and even adjust the fit of the virtual frames on your nose, which we didn’t encounter anywhere else - it really makes the fitting experience better and gave us the best sense of how the frames might look when worn. This is still very affordable compared to many brick-and-mortar opticians and high-end retailers, where you’d spend in the neighborhood of $1,000 for a similarly spec’d pair but not far off major discount retailers like Costco.Įyebuydirect’s try-on tools are the most complete and easy to use of all of the eyeglass retailers we tested. A pair of basic Wayfarer-style frames we ordered as readers similarly met our expectations, with quality acetate construction and similarly good optical quality to the pricier pair.īasic single-vision prescriptions are very inexpensive (well under $100), while pricing for a fully loaded pair, before discounts, runs about $400 for house brands ($100 more than Zenni) and in the $500 to $600 range for branded options like Ray-Ban. The fully spec’d browline pair we ordered compared very favorably to name-brand versions of the same concept from Ray-Ban and others, with solid build, very clear optics and a wide field of vision in the premium progressive prescription we ordered, and the fit was in order with what we’d expected from the online fit tools. We really liked the glasses we got from Eyebuydirect, especially given the inexpensive pricing. The search tools let you filter effectively by enough criteria that you can narrow things down quickly.

If you’re looking for value comparable to Zenni’s but want the option of browsing familiar names, it’s hard to beat.Įyebuydirect’s collection is huge, which means you’ll find both a wide range and a lot of variations on similar themes.

With a mix of affordable house brands and good deals on a range of premium brands, Eyebuydirect offers flexible, complete search tools and a shopping process that is smooth and easy to navigate, with superior VR/AR try-on tools. Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account

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