LensPriceCompare Blog

LenspriceCompare blog was quiet during the summer but as the seasons change once again so do contact lens prices, coupons, rebates and discount offers.

We have had many inquiries for CoastalContacts $100 rebates, and sorry to say this promotion ended for Focus Night and Day and Focus Dailies 90 Packs on Aug 31st 2008. The good news is, we continue to run great deals on them and the purchase quantity has been reduced. During the rebate offer a purchase of 10 boxes of Focus Dailies and 6 boxes of Focus Night and Day was required. O2 Optix and FreshLook Colorblends rebates, although now reduced, are still great deals.

Summertime Acuvue rebates are still valid until the end of Sept 2008, so if you are looking to buy Acuvue contact lenses anytime soon, get your prescriptions ready and place your orders. Once the rebate expires there is no guarantee it will be renewed. As you can see above, Cibavision rebates were reduced this time, Acuvue might follow suit.

Coupons have remained very stable during the summer, but we are seeing fluctuations from some merchants and some coupons have changed. Lenspricecompare contact lens coupons are regularly updated and are removed automatically once they pass the expiration date. This way our coupons are always valid.

Changes are on the way to Lenspricecompare.com and we will announce them here as they happen, so stay tuned and subscribe to the RSS feed for convenient viewing. If you would like to see any changes to the site, leave a comment or email us.

Many of us remember the days when the Web was in its infancy and many sites were created from passion alone, simply to share information. And then around the mid nineties the Web experience underwent a transformation with the appearance of flashy graphics, tacky banners, and crass commercialization. With the advent of Google the web experience improved considerably, and the number of Web users and commercial marketers grew. Competition forced sites to pay for advertising, and to vie with each other for exposure and traffic. The principal methods of paying for traffic became pay-per-click and pay per action.

Pay Per Click
You may have arrived at this site through a pay-per-click search engine or sponsored advertisement. Advertising copy should address the problem you are trying to solve, e.g. where to purchase cheap contact lenses. If you arrive at this site and your questions and concerns are not addressed, it is quite likely you will leave and never come back! Because we paid for the click that brought you to our site in the first place, it is imperative that we provide you with the information and tools you expected to find here.

Performance Marketing (Pay Per Action)
The purpose of our site is to help you save money. We inform you about using coupons, free shipping, and contact lens rebates. Then we list online stores in order of final average cost for your lens type and quantity. The lens prices on our site are calculated based on your needs/criteria and presented in a convenient, easy-to-compare format that allows you to make an informed decision about which retailer you buy from. When you click through our links to the online store of your choice, the store knows you came from our site and records the resulting transaction as a referral. When the retailer processes your order, they pay us a referral –or performance—fee. Known as “pay per action” or “performance based marketing”, this system pays the referral fee only when a purchase is made.

Online referral services incur operational costs such as website development, programming, site maintenance, coupon and price updates, and marketing. The referral fees we earn when visitors click through our retailer links allow us to cover these ongoing costs and still make a profit so we can continue to provide a valuable service to price-conscious lens shoppers.

You now have a better understanding of how online lens price comparison sites make money, and also how important it is that you click through the store links to generate referral fees from your purchases.

Performance marketing can best be described as an online customer referral service.

By providing reviews, price comparisons, or other merit-based information, the Website guides the customer to another Website where they purchase a product or service. The affiliate Website receives a referral fee from this transaction.

A less direct form of performance marketing is the publication of Website banner advertisements. In this case, the affiliate allows banner ads to be placed near informational Website content. When a visitor clicks on the banner and buys a product, the affiliate site is paid a referral fee. Not all banner ads are pay-per-sale, many are pay-per-click and also pay-per-view.

In “A Practical Guide To Affiliate Marketing”, by Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov, affiliate marketing is defined as follows:
“Affiliate Marketing is basically performance based marketing, whereby affiliates/partners promote a merchant’s product/service and get remunerated for every sale, visit, or subscription sent to the merchant. The most frequently used payment arrangements include: pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, and pay per click compensations.”

According to Prussakov, Amazon.com started its original marketing program BuyWeb in 1994, and its current Associates Program in 1996.

Lenspricecompare.com, along with many other price comparisons sites, uses the pay-per-sale model to refer products and services to site visitors. Lenspricecompare.com refers visitors mostly based on contact lens prices, and is paid for sales generated through referrals.

Affiliate marketing has existed on the Web since large-scale commercialization began. Because the Web is structured as it is, affiliate marketing will be around as long as commerce continues to grow or remains in flux.

Coupon Summaries

Here we list details about coupons. The minimum quantity or purchase price and the overall discount value of the coupon. This is where you find out about coupon restrictions, exclusive coupons and rebates, and the main points about coupons. By the way there’s no retailers we know of that allow more than one coupon per purchase.

Coupon Codes

The most current coupon code is displayed here and automatically gets removed once expired. This is checked daily so, unless a data entry or retailer error is made, coupons are always fresh. Contact lens coupons are placed here for shopper convenience, and of course cost savings.

Coupon Savings Amount

Totals up how much you should expect to save by using this coupon. Sometimes it’s easy enough to figure out the savings but it’s not always crystal clear. If the savings amount happens to be a percentage, we calculate how much the savings are, and then subtract the amount from the total price. We also specify when you can use free shipping with the coupon and how much you will save.

Contact Lens Rebates Summaries

Generally, rebate rules have more restrictions than coupons. A recent prescription, usually within the past 90 days, is required along with a minimum prurchase. The minimum purchase is listed along with savings amounts. Rebates are sometimes a product of the manufacturer partnered with a retailer, so they are not always the same. Each retailer has a link from the product page to the rebate page when applicable. Get the full terms and conditions of the rebate there.

On the contact lens product pages, simply choose the number of boxes you need and the on-page software will auto-pick the coupons and rebates it thinks will save you the most money. At Lenspricecompare.com, we also have a feature for you to manually choose and then calculate coupons and rebates.

Compare Contact Lens Prices

Lenspricecompare does a lot more than simply compare contact lens prices! It factors in shipping, handling, coupons, and rebates, and then orders the list from lowest cost to highest cost to simplify shopper purchasing decisions.

It also factors in volume price breaks from retailers to provide the most accurate pricing possible. Sometimes retailers change a price or two without letting us know, but usually they are right on the money.

The lowest price changes significantly and retailers bounce up and down on the list according to the number of boxes chosen. So, this is a very dynamic price comparison and quickly saves you money.

Choose Number of Boxes

As mentioned above, there’s more to price comparison than multiplying the price by the number of boxes. When you choose your number of boxes, several costs and offers are calculated for you. Some rebates, specifically Acuvue rebates, require 24 boxes so the box count goes all the way from one to 24.

Lowest Average Price

Lists the lowest average price with costs and discounts factored in. This number displays the true value of your purchase. When you understand where this price comes from, there’s very little more you need to know before purchasing contact lenses online.

Pick Your Own Offers

At first we were not sure about adding this feature, but people use it, and so for now it stays. When you choose this option all coupons and rebates are set to zero, so you see the base price with totals. On choosing this option, all coupons and rebates are displayed on the lower half of the page, allowing you to see at a glance the offers available. This feature is most useful when you want to buy from a particular store, and would like to calculate the most appropriate offers for that store.

Shipping

The price comparison defaults to standard shipping, but you can choose expedited shipping too, and display the average cost in order of best price with expedited shipping factored in. Overnight shipping tends to change quite a bit and it is excluded for the time being. By clicking on “Select Shipping”, shipping costs are set to zero.

Handling

It is downright difficult to find handling charges until the checkout in many contact lens stores. That’s why we include it, spell it out, and display it right there on the page for you. A few stores don’t charge any handling. When all is said and done, the final cost is displayed for you so while some stores display a cheap base price, they make it back in handling. It’s a bit of a game really, but once you understand the numbers, it’s not so difficult to play!

Lowest Cost Per Box

On the optional menu you can choose a feature called “Auto Select Best Price Per Box” and it calculates the best deal based on all the coupons and rebates and everything! This is a really cool feature and we even had the software people add the number of calculations made to arrive at an answer!