Beautiful boards nobody sees
You have spent years choosing frames: independent designers, lesser-known European brands, a good range of children's frames, some titanium lines the chains do not carry. Walk into the practice and the boards are the best advert you have. Look at your website and there is a row of brand logos, a picture of the shop front and a line saying 'come in and browse our extensive range'.
Meanwhile, a patient who is due a test browses the frame pages on a chain's website on their phone, sees hundreds of styles with prices, and books there.
Why the range never makes it online
- Photographing frames and uploading them to the website takes time nobody has.
- Stock changes weekly, so any gallery goes out of date and shows frames you no longer have.
- Supplier images exist but are scattered across portals and emails in different sizes.
- The website and the practice system are separate, so nothing links a frame on the board to a page online.
- There is a worry that showing prices online invites comparison with online retailers.
So the online presence stays generic, and the thing that makes the practice different is only visible to people already standing in it.
What an invisible range costs
| What patients see online | What they conclude |
|---|---|
| Brand logos only | Probably a small range |
| No children's frames shown | Better to go to a chain for the kids |
| Out-of-date gallery | Frames they liked may not be there |
| No way to shortlist | Browse in person with no idea where to start |
Patients choosing a practice increasingly look online first. If your range does not appear there, you are competing on location alone.
How we build a live frame gallery
- We read frame stock from your practice management system, or from the frame stock records we set up with you, including supplier, model, colour, size and branch.
- Images come from supplier image files where you have permission to use them, or from quick photos taken on arrival against a plain background, using a simple phone app that names each image automatically.
- The gallery on your website shows frames currently in stock, filterable by shape, material, colour, size and whether they suit children, with branch shown for multi-site practices.
- Frames that sell or are removed from the boards drop off the gallery automatically.
- Patients can save frames to a shortlist, which is attached to their booking so the dispensing optician can have them ready at the appointment.
- Prices can be shown, shown as a range, or left off, as your practice decides.
- A simple report shows which frames are most viewed and shortlisted, which is useful when talking to suppliers.
We do not advise on which brands to stock or how to price them. The gallery shows what you have chosen, accurately and without hand-editing the website.
What changes
Your website finally shows the range that makes the practice worth visiting. Patients arrive with a shortlist and the DO has the frames out, which makes the dispensing conversation easier and more personal. Parents can see children's frames before they bring a reluctant child in. And the gallery stays accurate without anyone updating it, because it follows your stock.
The shortlist data is a small bonus: it shows which styles people are drawn to online, which may differ from what sells once they try frames on.
Is your range hidden?
- Your website shows brand logos rather than frames.
- Any frame gallery you have is out of date.
- Patients say they did not know you stocked a particular brand.
- Children's frames are not shown online at all.
- Nobody has time to photograph and upload new stock.