The Official VisionWeb Blog

Retail is an important part of your optical business. Paying attention to popular retail trends and applying those ideas to your practice is a good way to boost sales in your optical shop and beat online retailers.

After monitoring ecommerce patterns and cross-referencing them with eyecare retail predictions, we came up with 7 trends to watch in 2019 and beyond. We think this list provides valuable insight as to where the market for both retailers and eyecare professionals are going.

More than 50% of Americans prefer to shop online according to a study from BigCommerce. With more and more consumers choosing to shop online than in a physical store, it could be difficult to compete against the online retailers selling frames to your patients and undercutting your optical dispensing sales.

Over the past few months, we’ve been keeping a closer eye on the online competition and have realized there are a few things that you can learn from online retailers to make your practice more effective at converting frame sales in your optical dispensing shop.

One of the biggest jobs of being an optician in an eyecare practice is to sell, sell, sell. While it may seem like a straightforward sale since most patients coming into the practice will need to purchase products for their vision, the online competition your practice faces makes closing highly valued frame sales difficult.

While opticians might not necessarily consider themselves as "sales people," there is definitely a big sales component for that role in the practice. Some opticians even earn commission or incorporate sales into their performance goals.

We looked around for some of the most helpful sales tips on the web that we could find to help you think harder about your role as a salesperson, the strategies you use, and how you can increase sales in the optical dispensary.

Our peers over at EyeCarePro are experts in helping eyecare professionals market their products and services. Here's what they have to say about creating a name for your practice online:

Assuming you already have a great website—a must-have for years by now—we’re going to start with an overview of each of the 10 things you should be doing. 

The vast majority of searches for a new eye doctor are made on Google. If you want more new patients, then here are things you should be doing to make sure your practice ranks front and center in your area.

If you're in the growth stages of your practice, attending events can help you seek new job opportunities, experience software demos, learn about vision care developments, and broaden your network of OD peers. Most of these events revolve around continuing education (CE) opportunities, but many of them also include mingling events and product-related exhibits.

It's a good idea to keep a calendar of upcoming events because many registration deadlines are a month or so in advance. Here are a few conferences, tradeshows, and forums on our radar for the rest of 2019. We hope we have a chance to meet you at one of the events below.