Contact Lens selling website in Magento

BUILDING CONTACT LENS SELLING WEBSITE IN MAGENTO

UPDATE : If you are looking for our extension you can get them here - Contact Lens Magento 2 Extension and Contact Lens Magento 1 Extension.

Now-a-days Magento eCommerce platform can be used for selling almost anything on the planet, starting from baby shoes to professional Aircrafts. However, when it comes to sell customized products online, Magento turns out to be a little tricky solution. Though various new features (and plugins) have already been developed by the developers in order to sell customized products through Magento but still there is lot of vacuum to be filled.

Recently, we got an opportunity to build a Contact Lens selling website in Magento from scratch. In order to create a Magento store that sells contact lenses, the challenge was first to develop and integrate a functionality that enables providing custom options for grouped products in Magento. The whole site had to be designed in a way that customers can select different parameters and attributes for each (left & right) eye while purchasing lenses. Also providing discounts to customers on the basis of product quantities was a challenge.

Obviously designing contact lens selling website in Magento is not as easy as it looks. We have developed prescription contact lenses configurator for both - Magento 2 and Magento 1. So, in this article we are going to discuss the features of our latest Magento 2 Contact Lens Prescription Extension and our journey in building the very first Magento 1 extension.

Contact Lenses Order Module for Magento 2

We have released a Magento 2 Contact Lens extension recently, which converts your simple Magento store into Contact Lens selling website in minutes. It adds seven attributes with specified options at the Magento store. The extension displays selected values of attributes on product detail page in a dropdown so that customer can choose the option's value for left and right eyes.

From your Admin area, you can enable / disable the Contact Lens options which you want to show to the customers like Cylinder, Axis, Base curve, Diameter, Add type etc.




While adding products, you can select which values to show for each Contact Lens options. For example you can select values like -1.00, -0.75, -0.50, 8.40, 7.50 etc




On frontend, the customers will be able to enter the Contact Lens options for Left and Right eyes. The product page will display options for both the eyes in one page.




In shopping cart, all the contact lens options will be shown for both the eyes - left and right. Whenever a product is added, it will automatically show the quantity in the cart as "2" one for each eye.




Similarly, at the Admin side, the order will be shown with all the option details and quantity as 2.




Hence, the extension seems to be the easiest Contact Lens extension for Magento 2 in the market. You can download this Magento 2 extension from here.


Contact Lenses Order Module for Magento 1

We started off by using configurable product in Magento but very soon we had to discard it due to its limitations. We tried Group products but that too was not workable. Ultimately, we had to write our own custom plugin in Magento for selling contact lenses online. The main problem was that customers usually buy lenses for both the eyes so we had to define several specifications and attributes for two products (left & right eye lenses) such as power for left eye and right eye, base curve value, diameter, color etc.

OTHER CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING CONTACT LENS SELLING WEBSITE IN MAGENTO 1 :

* Major Problem was inventory management i.e. how inventory will be managed. As there were number of brands and each brand contains large number of product groups and each group contains number of products and each product contains number of specifications and attributes.

* How to import/enter all the products info into Magento?

* How to handle the contact lenses in Magento i.e. how to display two different products as a single product but with different specifications?

* How to handle the dependency between the specifications on the frontend i.e. which specification depends on which and also how system checks that which specifications are available at the time when website customer selects a particular specification?

* The Whole Process of adding Product info was very time consuming.

* How to sell a pair of configurable products together?

* How to add prescription lenses to Magento site?

SOLUTION

For a Magento store that sells contact lenses we have developed and integrated a functionality that enables custom options for grouped products. This functionality of extension allows for creating products with two identical sets of attributes. Buyers can select different values of product parameters and specify different product quantities. The purchased product appears in the shopping cart as two products with different attributes.

The extension enables shoppers to specify different requirements for left and right lens yet have an easy shopping experience. You can download this Magento 1 extension from here.

We are now expert in building Contact Lens Selling Website in Magento. Our highly talented and experienced large team of Magento developers are always ready to provide you best Web Development Services. They are very professional and are always ready to provide back-end support to build your online Contact Lens selling store a successful eCommerce store and a great start for your successful Business. Once again, the main issue in designing Contact Lens selling website in Magento is to set the attributes for both the eyes, right and left. And the second main issue is to enable grouping of Configurable Products. I hope we have solved these issues with our useful prescription contact lenses configurator for Magento.