How To Start a Medical Supply Business Online

Peter Manko, Ecommerce Consultant at ScienceSoft, is confident that the trend for digitization will continue in the sales of medical supply and equipment:

"Now, we witness global digitization of sales across all verticals, healthcare is no exception. But what puts medical supply businesses in a favorable position is a short life cycle and recurrent nature of medical assets, which makes them immune to market downturns." 

Numerous factors will shape the project cost: the volume of your product catalog, web design requirements, the scope of your audience targeting, the maturity of your business workflow automation and required integrations, to name a few. For the middle market of medical supply and equipment sales, we estimate an average cost range for the design and development of an ecommerce portal at $70-250K.

Challenge #1. Building ecommerce on top of an informational website: costly and time-consuming

Solution: Headless approach

If your medical supply business is already present online with a product catalog or an educational resource (mostly likely built on a CMS), you need to migrate your website from a CMS to an ecommerce platform to enable online sales. The migration might be challenging, however, as you will have to rebuild all the pages anew. The most cost-effective solution will be to decouple the front and back end of your CMS to enable headless data delivery. Then, you will create ecommerce pages and elements in a CMS and connect them via APIs to a newly implemented ecommerce back end.

Challenge #2. The market dominated by big players

Solution: Relationship marketing to accrue your market power

The market of medical supplies and equipment is pretty competitive with large manufacturers and suppliers having established long-term relationships with major clients. Market newcomers may try to overcome this entry market barrier by lowering the prices. This tactic, however, can be self-destructive and lead to a negative profit margin.

What ScienceSoft recommends is relationship marketing.

• Focus on product value and your professional expertise. Don’t just sell but explain how your products will benefit patients’ treatment and medical staff routine. As a rule, this demands vast content capabilities on the website to share knowledge in interviews, researches, discussions of healthcare trends and innovations, etc.
• Establish the practice of proactive customer contact. The ways to be proactive without expressing an explicit hard-sell intention encompass creating education materials and holding training and networking events for healthcare professionals (prospective customers), announcing your latest updates in social media, and more.

Challenge #3. The need for a sales team is eliminated by online retail

Solution: Sales team refocusing

For medical equipment business, an ecommerce portal is a self-service tool for clients to choose products, place orders and conduct payment transactions – the actions that used to require from them regular communication with salespeople via email, phone calls or fax. But ecommerce does not make a sales team redundant, rather it frees up their time for strategic thinking and customer relationship building. Their functions may shift to:

• Analyzing sales data to elicit trends and customer needs and, as a result, better plan customer engagement.
• Nurturing new prospects via cold calls, emails, in-person visits.
• Curating the creation of educational materials and supplying them to clients.
• Driving website evolution by promoting new features requested by clients during personal interactions.