I love statistics. I mean I really, really like to statistical analysis. One of the things that I needed to know was which of these contact lens sites garnered the most traffic. I don’t have access to anything resembling official sales figures — they all claim to be the biggest, best, quickest, most responsive, or prettiest. What I do have access to is the Alexa traffic numbers — which I’ve questioned in the past, but are good at the very least of showing traffic stats in broad strokes.
Here is what I found:
- Of the six covered sites they range from roughly the 25,000th most popular site on the internet to the roughly 500,000th most popular.
- All cater primarily to traffic from the United States, with 1-800-Contacts having 88% US traffic to ACLens having 67% US traffic.
Here are the rankings (as of 8/23/2008):
- 1800Contacts.com - Worldwide: 24,343 / US: 5,234
- Lens.com - Worldwide: 68,628 / US: 17,242
- AC Lens - Worldwide: 96,436 / US: 31,450
- DiscountContactLenses.com - Worldwide: 165,531 / US: 51,401
- Lensmart - Worldwide: 484,824 / US: 210,379
- LensWorld.com - Worldwide: 906, 657 / US: 450,367
What does it mean? They’re just numbers, but there is a clear divide between the top four and numbers five and six (who likely get fewer than 1,000 page views a day).
One could argue that you’re better off shopping where a lot of people do for the buying power — and then you’d look at the prices of the most popular and throw that logic (in this case) out the window.
