Michael Berk/CNN Underscored
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. If you’re looking for value comparable to Zenni’s but want the option of browsing familiar names, it’s hard to beat Eyebuydirect.
Eyebuydirect’s collection is huge, which means you’ll find both a wide range and a lot of variations on similar themes. The search tools let you filter effectively by enough criteria that you can narrow things down quickly.
Basic 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. 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.
Eyebuydirect’s try-on tools are the most complete and easy to use of all the eyeglass retailers we tested. 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.
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.
Two-day delivery (one day faster than even Zenni’s express service) is available for a select range of frames with single-vision prescriptions, so it’s about the cheapest way to get a pair of glasses in a hurry. With regular shipping, we got our glasses in nine business days.
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. If you’ve bought glasses in the past, this is probably welcome (since there’s definitely a drawer full of extra cases somewhere in your house), but it can be a little inconvenient if you’re new to eyewear.
You have only 14 days to return your glasses if you don’t like them, which is one of the shortest return periods of any online glasses retailer we looked at. 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.
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 in comparison with Zenni’s similarly priced frames. 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.
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’d prefer to see this alert earlier in the process.