Originally published March 4, 2020
Felix Gray: durable lenses for screen-damaged eyes
As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, let’s face facts: our screens aren’t going anywhere. Whether it’s answering emails or binging The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, our professional and personal lives almost inevitably rely on long periods of screen time. Unfortunately staring at a screen for long periods can result in some less-than-ideal side effects, such as eye pain and fatigue, not to mention sleep deprivation and headaches.
Thankfully, there are people out there who are doing their part to improve the situation. In 2016, American eyewear startup Felix Gray launched a welcome save for any of the screen addicts out there: proprietary lens technology designed to fight screen-related eye strain that still retains the look of normal lenses.
While other eyewear designers have lenses to combat eyestrain in the interconnected age, they are subpar compared to Felix Gray. Either their lenses are clear, but ineffective as they don’t filter blue light where it matters, or they’re effective, but tinted yellow. Felix Gray created a proprietary method of embedding a naturally occurring ocular pigment baked into their lens to achieve a product that is both highly effective and virtually clear.
Business Challenge: Reducing friction at checkout with a familiar and faster checkout experience
Felix Gray wanted to improve the online checkout experience for customers on desktop and mobile so the company opted to participate in a new upgrade program sponsored by Amazon Pay. As the company’s CTO, Houtan Fanisalek explained, Felix Gray’s leadership had experienced Amazon Pay first-hand and discovered how much faster and simpler the checkout experience could be when customers weren’t forced to manually fill in payment and address information for an order. Considering that the majority of Felix Gray’s sales come from mobile, a fast checkout proves extremely valuable.
We chose Amazon Pay because we learned that most of our customer base were also Amazon customers, and it made our checkout experience significantly faster.
- Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technical Officer, Felix Gray
Business Impact: Improved checkout, increased sales conversions and higher repeat purchase rates
What tangible differences have integrating Amazon Pay into their web store brought to Felix Gray? Houtan Fanisalek explains that the platform has had a positive effect on both the company’s sales as well as their customer experience.
Amazon Pay has proved to be the speediest option on Felix Gray’s web store – 70% faster than their native checkout. Felix Gray is seeing a 5% increase in sales conversion for customers who begin the checkout process with Amazon Pay. Felix Gray also found that customers who use Amazon Pay have less customer service questions about the checkout experience than those who use other payment methods.
The increase we’re seeing in sales conversions from Amazon Pay versus other payment methods is wild, but it’s really not crazy when you think about all the information that is pre-filled with Amazon Pay, and everything is ready to go for the customer. It’s a lot easier for customers to hit ‘Place Order’ than to enter all their information. By the time they enter their payment info, you’ve lost most of your customer base!
- Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technical Officer, Felix Gray
Just seeing the Amazon logo anywhere [makes me think], ‘Oh all right, this brand is legitimate’.
- Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technical Officer, Felix Gray
Perhaps more notable than that—and Fanisalek cites this as the biggest benefit—is the fact that repeat purchase rates are higher from customers who checked out with Amazon Pay than those who used another payment method. The percentage of Amazon Pay customers who come back to Felix Gray’s site within 90 days and make a purchase is 20% to 25% higher than the fraction of returning consumers who opted for any other payment option on their site.