Low Cost Glasses

Overview.

Low Cost Glasses provide high quality prescription glasses at low prices with a huge product range and fast turn around time. They wanted to launch a website to start selling their prescription glasses online and due to the nature of their product there were lots of aspects to this site that required extensive setup and customisation. We began this project in early 2019 and it has been an ever evolving entity ever since. The initial setup of the look and feel of the site, importing all the products and setting up export routines for their orders. From there we began extensive customisation to automate admin activities and streamline customer journeys and experience.

Next Day.

Following on from the prescriptions builder we coded in functionality to restrict lens options for orders that were to be delivered the next day. We added two next day journeys, one stand alone, and one as part of the normal customer journey. This meant that at any one time the website needed to check if the current makeup of the customer’s glasses applied for next day – and if so it would offer them the option. These were put on separate export routines and carried with them extensive restrictions and validations – including restricting shipping rates and payment options. To make this more complicated only certain products could be bundles with next day glasses, so notices and validations had to be set site wide when next day items were in the cart.

Discount Methods.

We worked extensively with the Woocommerce code to integrate two methods of discounts for Low Cost Glasses. The challenge here was that the bespoke aspect of their products and the prescription builder meant that we needed to approach things differently to provide more complicated discounts that Woocommerce offers. We extended the Woocommerce coupon functionality to allow discounts based on the unique makeup of each pair of glasses. For example, they could discount just reading glasses, just the lens price, just the addon price, the lens thickness, or a mixture of all of them. Equally discounts could be set against multiples, using fixed discounts or percentages, and again these could be set per product part. The other discount method we created allowed them to set discounts against the frame price based on product categories, tags and singular items – similarly using this to allow buy X get Y functionality.

Glasses Vector.

Since there was a huge range of frames listed on their website it was important to make sure that the customer could understand and see visually the measurements of each set of frames. We coded a vector with dynamic measurements overlaid. This fulled data from the product attributes to automatically populate the visualisation on each product.

Algolia & Product Badges.

As part of setting up the products externally we saved meta data on each product to allow Low Cost Glasses to show a range of product badges / messages. We made it so that these could be set per product, per category and per product attribute. This meant that they could easily attract customers to particular frames, as well as showing potential discounts.

Virtual Try On.

One of the fantastic sales tools on this website was the virtual try on. We used a VTO framework and API, to create a simple way for customers to try the glasses on. At the click of a button the customer was shown a popup with a stream of their webcam inside. From there the glasses would fit to their face and they could try on the various product options, altering the colours and tints before deciding whether to buy.

Customer Order Edits.

As part of the ordering process we customised the checkout so that at any time during the checkout process they could update and change their prescription. This dramatically reduced the amount of support required from customer services and again put the functionality in the hands of the customer.

Pause Orders & Tracking Updates.

To ensure that there was a cool off window for customers, and to make sure that the admins had time to check over any orders, we setup a paused order function. This effectively held back all orders from being fulfilled for a set period. During this time the customer could change the order, add to the order or cancel it before the order was set to the lab for fulfilment. We extended this with a function for the customer to flag their order and change the status of it to on hold – just to ensure that nothing went in to production without the customer being happy.

We also linked up with Low Cost Glasses API to receive tracking updates from the lab. These then fed in to a custom area in the customer’s account section where they could see exactly where their order was up to.