Why it's hard to buy eyewear online: E-tailer complains to OFT

Industry regulator the General Optical Council (GOC) said that it would only change the situation if health and safety concerns arose, despite Office of Fair Trading (OFT) rules that say that regulation must not restrict competition.

The founder of online glasses retailer Metsuki.co.uk has lodged a formal complaint with the GOC and consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading, asking the OFT to force the GOC to conduct an assessment to see if its rules are compatible with the Government's competition policies.

Metsuki managing director Ewan McFarlane started an online petition to urge the regulator and the Government to force the inclusion of one measurement, pupillary distance, on prescriptions. Currently customers must measure themselves and inform retailers if they want to buy glasses online.

"I started out doing this because we had complaints from our customers about how they felt it was wrong, it was their pupil distance, it's a measurement that was taken [from] them and it was information even under the Data Protection Act that they should be allowed," McFarlane told podcast OUT-LAW Radio.

A customer's pupillary distance is the distance between their pupils and it is essential if lenses are to properly correct someone's sight. It is not one of the measurements that are mandatory in the written prescription an optometrist must provide to customers, though.

"I think it is anti-competitive and unethical for professionals who have been paid to carry out an eye test not to provide this additional piece of information which allows a prescription to be actually a proper, true, complete instruction on how to go and manufacture a pair of spectacles," he said.

When the market for glasses was deregulated in the 1980s opticians were ordered to provide a written prescription to customers so that they could buy their glasses somewhere other than the shop in which their eyes were tested.

Regulator the GOC determined what information must be in that prescription and that was set in law.

McFarlane said  that the information contained in the prescription was appropriate for the 1980s because customers would always be buying glasses in a shop where the pupillary distance could be measured. He said that the prescription should be changed to reflect a new kind of competition.

The GOC said it will not change its regulations, and that McFarlane's arguments are based on a misinterpretation of the way that opticians work.

"This is a distortion of this particular issue," said GOC head of communications Kate Fielding. "The prescription is not a set of instructions to make your glasses. The eye examination is a check of the health of the eye and a test of the refractive area and that's the optometrist's job, that's what they're being paid to do when they're carrying out an eye examination."

Fielding said that to ask optometrists to provide PD measurements so that people could buy glasses online instead of where their eyes were tested would not be fair to high street opticians.

"What's being suggested really is that high street retailers should be providing online competitors with an advantage by carrying out part of a fitting service free of charge," she said. "Online retailers generally can't offer that service because they aren't [seeing] the customer face to face. A high street retailer can offer the service because they have got the premises, they've got the staff and equipment and so on, which all have a cost."

Fielding said that the GOC would only change its mind on health and safety grounds. "We are not here to interfere in competitive issues," she said.

But McFarlane said that consumer regulator the OFT has rules for regulators that say that they must ensure that their policies and regulations do not have the effect of stifling competition.