Lenscrafters
Discounts and Insurance
Also, I noticed while cruising the LensCrafters site that they have a couple of different discounts available: if you're a member of AAA or AARP, you can get a 10% discount on your contact lenses.
Here's what they say about insurance:
"LensCrafters accepts EyeMed Vision Care and most major vision insurance plans, including Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, Blue Cross of California, UniCare, AIG, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina."
Of course, you can also use your Flexible Spending Account at LensCrafters.
Website design
I like the clean design of this site: no popups, and no distracting ads. The downside was that there wasn't a lot of information about the lenses. I like sites like 1800contacts.com that give product information like manufacturer, lens material and water content. The Lenscrafters site doesn't even tell you if the lenses are designed for weekly or monthly replacement.
Another thing I didn't like about the site was the "contact lens selection guide." I thought it would be a tool to find the best contacts for me. But it's just a promotion of individual contact lens brands. For example, you click on "colors," and it gives you a description of FreshLook contacts. Not much of a selection guide if you want to consider any of the other like 20 brands of colored lenses!
These weren't huge drawbacks to the shopping experience for me, since I already knew what I wanted and knew all the information about the lenses. But someone who's trying to compare lenses won't get much help from LensCrafters.
Ordering
Ordering your lenses is straightforward if you have your prescription with you. Many contact lens sites will contact your doctor for you to get your prescription. LensCrafters says, "If you do not have a copy [of your prescription], we will contact your specified eye doctor and confirm your prescription." However, it's not possible to place an order on this site without typing in your prescription information. I guess you could just type it in wrong, and as long as you provide your doctor's information they could correct your order. I didn't have to mess around with this, but I think other sites are more helpful about this situation.
I placed my order at 11 AM on a Saturday morning and used free shipping. which is USPS Priority 5-7 business day delivery. That was June 21, and on Monday, June 23, I got an e-mail saying that my order had shipped. My credit card wasn't billed until June 25.
I was less than thrilled with the tracking options available. First of all, on the lenscrafters site there's an option for "my account." For some reason this is not where you check your orders; to do that, you go to the contact lens menu and sign in.
(Incidentally, if you try to use the "my account" link, it causes Internet Explorer to give you a big red "x" and say, "The security certificate presented by this website was issued for a different website's address. Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server. . . . If you choose to ignore this error and continue, do not enter private information into the website." I'm sure the website is fine, but it's not very professional to have your security certificates messed up.)
Once you've navigated to your contact lens account, you can check your order status and see when your order was shipped, but you don't actually get tracking information. Well, there's a tracking number, but clicking it just takes you back the main screen for your account. I cut and pasted it into the USPS website tracking feature, but got a message saying that online tracking was not available for that number.
Order Fulfillment
Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about tracking, since the order arrived on June 28, five business days after the shipment notification. Everything was there, it was all well-packaged, and the prescriptions were accurate.
Overall
If you know all your prescription information and just want to reorder your contacts, LensCrafters Online will work well for you. I got a good deal from them because they give more Alaska Airline miles than other contact lens stores do. My order arrived promptly, with free shipping. As long as they keep it up with the airline miles, I'll continue to shop there, in spite of a few problems with the website design.