Snapchat Spectacles are now available online

Snap is now selling Spectacles online in the United States. The funky $129 Snapchat sunglasses with a built-in camera were announced in the fall, and for a while they were pretty hard to get, but the company has now closed up the pop-up shop in New York City. It’s also putting the traveling vending machines on hold — though Snap says the “Snapbots” will still show up in “surprising” locations in the future. Customers are limited to six Spectacles purchases per household when ordering via the web. 

It’s not a surprising move — Snap let loose that it wanted to “significantly broaden the distribution of Spectacles” when it filed for an IPO a few weeks ago — but it is basically a necessary one. While the Snapbots were an exciting experience, it couldn’t have been cheap to truck them around the country. And once the novelty (and scarcity) of Spectacles wore off, the NYC pop-up shop started to look awfully empty. 

Snap’s SEC filings also gave us our first solid look at the company’s financials. They’re around what analysts expected, but the numbers aren’t pretty. Spectacles probably aren’t going to make Snap a ton of money, even now that they’re available online. But every little bit will help.

The article was published on : theverge