INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A Y Combinator-backed startup, JetLenses, is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites, like 1-800-Contacts, Lens.com, and other
online ordering systems offered by major retailers, such as Walmart
The startup goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, in areas
like prescription verification, order tracking, compliance and fulfillment, then pass those savings on to customers.
The company also
promises fair and transparent pricing, so there aren&t surprises at checkout, and offers customers free shipping on their orders.
JetLenses
was founded byDhaivat Pandya, the son of an eye doctor who studied Statistics and Computer Science at Harvard
His background allowed him to identify the market inefficiencies in this business, in order to develop a new solution, he says.
&It was a
space where doing this kind of work & engineering and data science & would have an immediate impact that I could see on a day-to-day basis,&
Pandya explains as to why he decided to target the prescription lenses market
&A lot the reason why contact lenses are so expensive is just overhead,& he says.
Around 20 percent of the time, the online sites run into
issues when verifying customer prescriptions
For example, the eye doctor may have relocated their practice, and their phone and fax numbers changed.
This ends up eating away a lot of
time in terms of human labor, as staff has to research if the practice still exists and locate their new contact information before they can
proceed with the verification
JetLenses, meanwhile, will instead try to first match the doctor information to a data set it maintains of existing practices to find a
match, then locate the new phone number and fax automatically
It also automatically faxes the office to verify the prescription, and
processes the doctor office response.
The company is leveraging data science around the logistics of order fulfillment, too, in order to
determine which fulfillment partner to use for each incoming order.
These sorts of engineering tasks may already be common to larger
e-commerce shopping sites, but haven&t really been put to work in the prescription lenses market, Pandya says.
He says JetLenses& lower
pricing comes from these improvements & it not just slashing prices to attract customers.
&Our margins are basically identical to others in
&The goal is not to alter the business by just selling [lenses] for cheaper.&
While not a comprehensive review, I tried out online ordering
on JetLenses before speaking to the company, to see how it compared with my usual site, 1800Contacts.com
I was fairly surprised to find that a 6-pack of my Acuvue Oasys for Astigmatism lenses were $32.99 on JetLenses, compared with the $51.99 I
(1800Contacts encourages shoppers to buy 4 boxes per eye at once, to get a $40 rebate on these lenses
But that a lot to spend all at once.)
JetLenses will honor the manufacturer rebates, too, and works with customers& vision insurance
plans.
The website itself is a little wonky in parts, but it only been online since the fall
You&ll need to know your lens brand and do a search rather than try to browse your way
as the site navigation is somewhat lacking, I found
But to save nearly $20 a box Worth it.
JetLenses isn&t the only contacts lens e-commerce startup out there right now
Another, Hubble, raised $73.7 millionlast year for its own brand of daily disposable lenses, sold on subscription
That the not route JetLenses is going.
Instead, it aims to apply these data science techniques to other prescription businesses, like dental
products or prescription creams.
For now, the startup is focused on raising a seed round following Y Combinator Demo Day to scale the
