Selling Medical Equipment Online
with Magento – Key Challenges

The lure of eCommerce and businesses going online touched many domains. Medical Equipment industry is not remain immune to magic of eCommerce and rightly so.
United States of America is the largest target market for sales of Medical equipment and allied Medical devices globally. According to a report by Statista, the industry saw a steady annual growth of 6.6 % YoY from 2012 to 2017 due to increased access to health insurance.
Johnson and Johnson a behemoth which deals in Medical equipment and devices globally registered $ 35 billion through sales in US alone.
The list goes on and on. With the government getting more regulations and programs to increase the health cover of the populations, the demand for medical equipments is only bound to grow. The direction is rightly towards eCommerce where other retailers operating in sporting equipment, wine and even firearms are already making strides.
With these strong winds of change, are you ready to streamline the challenges that make selling medical equipment online easy?

Challenges faced by the Medical equipment industry

1. Securing Data
   Medical and health industry is a domain where there is sensitive information not only related to financial details but even customer personal information involved. With the amount of security breaches happening online safeguarding such sensitive information is very important.
   Any misuse of this data would have serious repercussions to the company financially.
2. Managing Patient Experience
   The customers whom you target are your average retail customers. They are quite special and you should make every interaction with your customers count.
   You as a business should have an apparatus in place where things like shipping of complex medical equipment like power wheel chairs, taking insurance cover and other benefits into account and having the patient’s medical condition and history in one place should be taken care of.
   Many retailers who are selling medical equipment online have this figured out. If you do not take this into measure simply going online does not make sense. Medical equipment industry even should address the challenge of customer personalization.
   There should be a mechanism where the patients or customers must be dealt with in an individual way based on their previous medical history and prior requirements. This way providing a great customer experience becomes easier for businesses planning to sell online.
3. Detailed product description
   Shoppers and customers are very much into eCommerce and they expect the same kind of experience for any product they shop. It includes buying medical equipment like lift chairs, power wheelchairs and even medical drugs.
   Having detailed pictures with 360° view and with detailed product descriptions of the make, weight it supports or any related information goes a long way. Having extensions on your site to show relevant alternative products even makes the users search easier and gives you an opportunity to cross or upsell products.

i95Dev experience and implementations in medical equipment industry

We have been providing industry specific eCommerce solutions to companies from various industries since 2000. During the course of our journey we interacted with eCommerce businesses selling medical equipment such as power and manual wheelchairs, lift cars and other items related to adult disability.
Our team did a detailed in depth research to understand the kind of challenges and hurdles they were facing and came with a complete eCommerce solution. These are some of the changes that we suggested and implemented to our client.

1. Product Showcasing
   We developed a user friendly Magento Store from the scratch. This solved their primary concern of showcasing their wide range of product easier. We customized their Magento e-commerce store with enhanced product showcasing features like zoom in, product rotation etc.
   What did it solve?
   Magento eCommerce is designed primarily for the purpose of eCommerce. It has beautiful themes and designs with excellent extensions and modules to better feature large product catalogues.
   Our Design and development team developed a state of the art Magento eCommerce store from the scratch and did a meticulous data migration. We added elements to better showcase their product offerings and even offers to make them more appealing and easy to surf for shoppers.
   Prior to contacting us they were running on a legacy platform which completely failed to showcase their wide range of product offering in details. This took care of the primary requirement of our client which was providing ease of online shopping to their customers with better promotions and product showcasing.
2. Inventory access and pricing
   i95Dev implemented an integration between the developed Magento eCommerce platform and their backend ERP. This helped our client in managing inventory and avoid overselling and underselling their inventory.Inventory management and pricing is a critical factor in medical equipment industry due to various factors one being price sensitivity.
   What did it solve?
   The integration between Magento eCommerce and their ERP helped them streamline their inventory better. This pulled in the information of the inventory which was available in their warehouses and projected them onto the store.The pricing details were also projected onto the Magento eCommerce store. This gave the shoppers a real time view of the number of SKUs available along with the pricing structure without any discrepancies.This greatly reduced their scope for errors and manual intervention.
3. Consulting services and customized extensions
   i95Dev Analytics and Product team did a detailed understanding of our clients industry and the parameters they were operating with. This comes with our prior experience of providing solutions to eCommerce players of other industries.
   We understand that no two businesses are same, they come with their own set of challenges. With that understanding, we rarely promote off the shelf products like our contemporaries.
   What did it solve?
   Our client was operating multiple stores and offering free shipping services to clients from mainland USA. They did not offer discounts and even had to accept insurance numbers from clients who had health cover.
   Based on such unique insights and by analyzing their competitors we sourced third party extensions. Some of these extensions were for Testimonials, Store locators and blog.
   We modified these extensions further and seamlessly integrated them into the functionality of their Magento eCommerce store. This achieved their major requirement of having an omni-channel connected eCommerce platform, which would integrate with all their major backend systems.
   Our client could finally focus on selling medical equipment and touching lives of numerous people who were associated with their brand.

Conclusion

i95Dev worked with various companies spanning different continents since 2000. We are Magento platinum certified eCommerce solutions providers. Our clientele span across various domains both B2B and B2C. Apart from Magento development, we even provide integration solutions between your Magento store and the most widely used ERP systems (Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SAGE, SAPB1). If you are an eCommerce operation looking to take the next logical step contact us at info@i95dev.com.