DoItYourself Eyeglass Shopping on the Internet

AN eyeglass frame is little more than bits of plastic and some metal. It is not very high-tech, although frames should be designed and manufactured with precision.

The online companies offer wider selections and lower prices than most optical stores, although costs are about the same as at big-box stores. Optometry professors urge caution, however, especially when prescriptions call for bifocals or progressive lenses.

But a frame that costs less than to make in Italy can retail for at least 0 at an optical shop in the United States. And it is not hard to find frames, especially the limited editions bearing tiny designer logos, with price tags of 0.

If ever there was a market ripe for the intervention of the Internet, which allowed consumers to find discounts on best-selling novels, digital cameras or Hawaiian vacations, eyeglasses would be it.

Although 67 percent of American adults wear prescription eyeglasses, according to a September 2006 Harris Interactive poll done for the Vision Care Institute, and a higher percentage don sunglasses during the summer, online eyeglass stores have never caught on the way other online commerce sites have, said James Hilford, president of Eyeglasses.com, a vendor. "It is a market that is still in its infancy," he said.

One reason for that is that buying prescription glasses online makes people nervous. Consider the reaction of Harold L. Friedman, an associate clinical professor at the State University of New York, who has been an optometrist for 48 years: "Would you buy anything that is a medical product - because that's what glasses are - over the Internet? You are looking at this as just another product. But it is not."

Certainly, buying online imposes some impediments. People like to try on the frames, which is hard to do remotely even with the feature many sites have in which you upload your photograph and superimpose frames over it. People worry that they might be unable to decipher their prescription, which is covered with numbers, numbers with decimal points and plus and minus signs and will type it incorrectly. They also worry that if the glasses won't fit properly, they will have no one to fix them, or they will have to return them.

But those hardly seem like compelling reasons not to give it a try if you want to save some money. The product is coming from the same places.

The biggest impediment to widespread embrace of Internet eyeglass shopping might be that the glasses still aren't cheap enough online. Stores like FramesDirect.com or Eyeglasses.com don't market themselves as discounters, though name-brand frames sell there for about 30 percent less than at many stores. Lenses can be about half as much.

But the eyeglasses are no cheaper than what you could get at the optical department of a Wal-Mart or a Costco. The selection is certainly better than at a big-box store. FramesDirect, for example, says it has 110,000 models on display.

A second category of online vendor skips the designer labels entirely and sells discount frames made in China. One of them, ZenniOptical.com, used to be called 19dollareyeglasses.com until it started selling eyeglasses for as little as . Its most expensive frames are titanium half-frames. If it were made in Italy and sanctified with a designer's name, it could cost 0 or more.

The online stores do attract a loyal following from those who dare to try them. Glassyeyes.com chronicles one man's adventures in online buying. The blog has become a repository of reviews on various online vendors like Goggles4U.com and 39dollarglasses.com.

Betty McFarlane had no qualms about buying her frames and lenses online. Ms. McFarlane, 78, a retired executive secretary for the Seattle board of public works, went to Eyeglasses.com looking for a particular frame, a rimless titanium frame called Silhouette. She was aiming to save money; the frames and lenses cost her 0. "I didn't want to sit at an optometrist's office," she said. She is a painter now, and she said: "My eyes mean a lot to me. The reason I wasn't worried was because I had the prescription."

Most optical stores have a huge markup on frames, in the range of 50 percent to 100 percent. "They buy it wholesale at a much higher cost than we sell it for retail," said Tibor Laczay, owner of ZenniOptical, based in San Rafael, Calif. Optical shops have to mark the price up so much because most don't sell in high volume, especially those attached to the office of an optometrist or ophthalmologist.

Although the frames carry fat profit margins, the real money for the retailer is in the lenses. There the markup can be three to seven times the wholesale price. Most single-vision lenses - those that are not bifocals or the "progressive lenses," which are bifocals without the line - are precast in large quantities and can cost about to make. The eyeglass dispenser just picks them out of a tray.

The markups are high because eyeglass retailing is a very fragmented business. There are more than 40,000 optical dispensaries in the country. Many, especially those in a doctor's office, get little volume so the few eyeglasses sold have to cover the rent and payroll. "It's an extraordinarily inefficient market," Mr. Hilford said. "It's slowly starting to change."

The optical chains do get more volume, and with those markups, they have attracted Luxottica, the large Italian eyeglass frame maker. It has snapped up the LensCrafters, Pearle Vision and D.O.C. Optics chains in the United States. It also owns the Sunglass Hut chain.

Frame making is decidedly less fragmented. That industry is dominated by three companies: Luxottica and Safilo of Italy and Marchon of Melville, N.Y. While none of them have online stores, their designer-name frames can be found online.

E-mail: yourmoney@nytimes.com