39% of the people you examine buy their glasses from someone else

Here is a number most practice owners have never seen for their own practice. We surveyed 200 Canadians about how they buy glasses, and 39% got their eye exam in one place and bought their glasses somewhere else. That is 78 people. Another 56% bought where they had the exam.

Call it your capture rate: of the people you examine, how many buy their glasses from you? If yours matches the survey, four out of ten patients walk out of the exam room and spend their glasses money with someone else.

And they leave at a very specific moment. We asked what prompted the purchase. Among people who stayed, 45% said a new prescription. Among people who left, 64% did. The customer you lose is not someone whose glasses broke on a Saturday. They just sat in your chair, heard that their eyes changed, and walked out holding a piece of paper. The loss happens at the front desk, in the minute the prescription is handed over. We wrote a whole post about that minute: Hand over the PD. Keep the customer.

Why they say they left

We gave the 78 a list and let them tick more than one reason.

1. 77%

   Price

   60 people

2. 50%

   Better selection elsewhere

   39 people

3. 32%

   I wanted to shop around

   25 people

4. 13%

   I prefer buying online

   10 people

5. 1%

   I felt pressured to buy on the spot

   1 person

Price first, by a mile. Where did they go? Online, a chain, a big-box store, an independent, in roughly equal shares. Only one of the 78 went to another optometrist’s office.

You will not beat a website on price, and you don’t have to. When we asked what would make buyers pick a store over online, the top answer was seeing frames on their own face with an honest person beside them, not price (Insight 3). And “price” often means “I didn’t understand the price”: customers who knew what the frame, the lenses and the coatings each cost were five times more likely to end up very satisfied (Insight 1).

The two reasons under price are the ones nobody has written about. Both are yours to fix.

Half of them wanted better frames

Fifty percent of leavers said the selection was better somewhere else. They are not who you might think. Most of them also ticked price, so selection was the tie-breaker, not the whole story. Nearly one in five paid more than $500 for the pair they bought elsewhere. And more of them went to another store than went online. This is mostly a store losing to a store that had the frames the customer wanted.

“Whenever you go to an optometrist, the men’s glasses are so incredibly boring and mundane. You have to shop online in order to get anything fun!”

“The place where I purchased my glasses was more upscale and had better selection than the one in my optometrist’s office.”

Notice what they are really saying. The customer looked at the wall, saw nothing they wanted, and assumed that was all you had. The wall is a few hundred frames. What you can order is hundreds of thousands. The customer does not know that unless you show them.

So sell the catalogue, not the wall. Ask what they are picturing before you show what is in stock, then look it up together and say, “I can have that here Thursday.” Nobody leaves for better selection when they just watched you find the frame they wanted. Lume’s frame catalogue is built for exactly that conversation.

A third of them just wanted to think about it

Thirty-two percent said they wanted to shop around. Read what frustrated them and you see why: “having to make a decision in the moment,” “deciding which model to buy,” “the different frames make it hard to choose one.” They were not unhappy with you. They were not ready, and there was no easy way to leave without losing their place.

Once they were out the door, you were one of several options, and the chain down the street or the website on their phone was easier to come back to than you were. The fix is to make leaving easy and coming back easier: they walk out with your priced quote on their phone and a frame set aside with their name on it. What that looks like is in the list at the end.

They didn’t leave angry. They left for the deal.

Leavers and stayers were equally satisfied with their purchase. Same share very satisfied, same share who will definitely go back. Nobody in the leaver group described a bad experience with the place that did their exam. They would have been just as happy buying from you.

What separates the two groups is how they chose. Stayers chose by habit and distance: 57% said “I’d been there before” and 44% said “close to home or work.” Leavers chose by price: 54% picked their store because of a price or promotion, against 19% of stayers. One more number in the same direction. Benefits about to renew prompted the purchase for 15% of stayers and 4% of leavers. The customers who stay are the ones who heard from you before they thought to look anywhere else.

So you did not lose a fight on the day of the exam. You were not in the room when the decision got made. Loyalty is built between visits, and the deciding moment is the minute the prescription changes hands.

What to do about it this week

1. Count your capture rate. One month, exams versus glasses orders from those exams. Put the number where the team can see it.
2. Ask before you show. “What are you picturing?” comes before the wall. Find it in the catalogue and give them a date.
3. Let them leave with the quote and a held frame. Email the priced quote with the prescription on it before they walk out, so any comparison they make is like for like (Lume does it in one tap). Put the frame aside until Friday. Then one follow-up text a few days later, which Lume sends on its own.
4. Remind them before their benefits reset. It brings them back to you before they think to look elsewhere, and Lume’s reminders do that part unattended.

How we know

We surveyed 203 Canadians who wear prescription glasses or contact lenses. We found and paid them through Prolific, between July 21 and 23, 2026. Two hundred answered the questions about where they had their exam and where they bought. Seventy-eight bought somewhere other than where they had their exam, and 113 bought at the same place; the comparisons above are between those two groups. Every percentage is out of the people who answered that question. With groups of 78 and 113, treat differences under about ten points as noise.

They came from nine provinces and bought their last pair everywhere a Canadian can buy glasses. Who they are and what we asked is in the series introduction.

One thing we’d rather say out loud than hide. The group leans Ontario, at 47%, and leans young, with 77% under 45. So it isn’t a perfect picture of Canada.