How to build a hyperlocal commerce platform for your online pharmacy business

In the pandemic era, one of the few businesses that saw astronomical growth was the  medicine, e-pharma and healthcare industries.

Big pharmacy multi vendor marketplaces like Apollo, Netmeds, PharmEasy etc, grew unprecedented and enterprise pharmacy chains were inspired to replicate the success of these players. 

Building an online medicine delivery platform was the trendiest and most sought after business move. 

Wonder why?

Here are a few trends to put the picture in perspective for you: 

• $125.5 billion is the estimated reach of the global epharmacy market by 2028
• $5 billion is the estimated reach of Indian healthtech industry by 2023
• $14.8 billion is the value of diagnostics labs market in India in 2022
• 3.6 X growth forecast for the online pharmacy market from 2021 to 2028
• 40% of businesses in Indian ecommerce industry is associated with hyperlocal commerce

Source: Markets and Markets, Businesswire, TOI

The stupendous rise in the online pharmacy business makes it just the right time to build a hyperlocal platform to sell medicines online. With a marketplace that caters to diverse categories of products like medicines, surgical equipment, testing kits, ayurvedic products etc, you can carve your own niche in the pharma ecommerce market.

How to build a hyperlocal commerce platform for your online pharmacy business 

To build a hyperlocal commerce platform for your online pharmacy business, you can go around with one of the following two options:

• Build the marketplace from scratch and set up your warehouses in different localities
• Use a SaaS-based turnkey ecommerce solution provider to build multi vendor marketplace and onboard local vendors as partners

However, enterprise brands planning to build a disruptive quick commerce pharmacy online store should be looking at a SaaS-based ecommerce solution provider. 

Wondering why? Here are a few reasons that make using turnkey ecommerce solutions a wise pick for your online medicine delivery business:

• Saves cost of setting up multiple warehouses in different localities for hyperlocal delivery of your orders
• No need to worry about the logistics and delivery set-up for your hyperlocal commerce business
• Saves time of creating multiple physical pharmacy stores to build multi channel presence as the vendors you onboard have their own physical stores 
• No licensing issue as each vendor comes with their own license to sell the medical products in given geo-locations
• Easy to scale to new markets with multiple vendors catering to customers in various locations 
• Quickly diversify to new product lines like beauty and personal care, hygiene products, personal health equipments by onboarding new vendors 

When you create a multi vendor marketplace with a future-ready e-commerce platform like StoreHippo, you can quickly scale your pharmacy business to any number of products, dealers/vendors, locations etc. StoreHippo ecommerce platform comes with complete hyperlocal marketplace solutions, 300+ inbuilt features and 120+ seamless integrations that makes it easy for you to design out-of-box solutions.     

10 step-guide to building your hyperlocal online pharmacy marketplace

Let’s look at the complete 10-step guide to build your hyperlocal online pharmacy marketplace with a turnkey ecommerce solution provider like StoreHippo:

Choose your ecommerce platform

The first step towards building your online pharmacy business is to choose your ecommerce solution provider. With the right platform, you can create user-friendly hyperlocal online stores seamlessly. StoreHippo offers SaaS-based turnkey ecommerce solutions to help you build your desired business model in record time. 

With its 360-degree ecommerce solutions, StoreHippo offers a host of in-built features to help you build customized ecommerce platforms for your online medicine delivery business. You can use the creative control from StoreHippo to offer extreme personalization and build innovative, tailor-made solutions with its MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture. 

Create a pharmacy store for each location

Your pharmacy brand can go a long way with multi-location based stores. As you plan to cater to multiple audience groups across different localities, you need to create multiple hyperlocal stores that make it easy to reach out to different customers.  

With StoreHippo, you can seamlessly create multiple hyperlocal commerce sub-stores for your pharmacy business. StoreHippo comes with an inbuilt multi store ecommerce set-up to build location-specific sub stores. You can manage multiple pharmacy stores efficiently using a single dashboard. You can also handle multi-level discounts for your pharmacy vendors or promote sales in your hyperlocal stores. With the inbuilt marketing tools, you can offer localized promotions and grow your hyperlocal pharmacy marketplace.

Onboard multiple vendors

Once you have decided on the right multi vendor marketplace platform for your e-pharmacy business, the next step is to onboard vendors and list their  homeopathy or ayurvedic medicines and other regular medical products on the platform. With StoreHippo comprehensive multi vendor solutions, you can onboard the vendors and list their products in just a few clicks. 

StoreHippo offers extensive vendor management solutions to seamlessly onboard the vendors and manage everything from their products to commissions to easy payments to the vendors. With a comprehensive solution, StoreHippo creates individual vendor accounts with simple registration processes. It also comes with an user-friendly dashboard to help the sellers manage their day-to-day business operations seamlessly.

Upload unique catalog for each sub-store

It becomes distinctively easy to target your customers when you segment them into different categories like location, age group or their past buying habits. As you have created an e-pharmacy multi vendor marketplace and set up different stores for different audience groups, you can cater to their unique medical needs, preferences and past buying habits. 

StoreHippo’s multi store ecommerce solutions enable you to showcase store specific catalouge for your target customer segments. You can also promote best-selling products like personal health equipment or ayurvedic products by creating dynamic marketing pages.You can list the same products at different prices depending on the location or the deal offered at each sub-store using the pricing override feature. StoreHippo offers inbuilt order management (OMS) and inventory management solutions with centralized control for ease of doing business. You can simply choose and add different products to each sub-store inventory. 

Build your mobile presence

Did you know that 63% of mobile phone users prefer buying from a company owning a mobile app or mobile website? Yes, while ordering medicine online, smartphones are the most preferred shopping channel for customers today. Also, when you align mobile commerce for online medicine delivery, you get better customer insights and collect more data to create strategic marketing campaigns. 

StoreHippo is built on mobile-first technology offering a variety of mobile-ready solutions for your e-pharmacy business. You can create Android and iOS apps directly from your admin dashboard without any coding required. You can also create apps for admins, vendors, delivery boys etc enabling you to run the online pharmacy business on the go. The multi vendor marketplaces powered by StoreHippo are PWA stores that look and feel like mobile apps even on entry-level devices with poor internet connectivity. 

Offer customizations and personalizations 

It becomes quite important to make your customers feel special and heard.  80% of the customers like to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. As you offer a personalized buyer journey, you create a special bond with your buyers. Simply put, personalization helps bring in more loyal customers and hence profits for your online medicine delivery business. 

With the right ecommerce platform, you can quickly offer a personalized shopping experience to all your customers. StoreHippo offers a host of analytics tools and reports to help you understand your customers’ buying patterns and offer extensive personalization to them. Built on decoupled headless architecture, StoreHippo helps you to tweak your backend and front end and implement multi-level personalizations. You can customize your shipping solutions, and digital payments, offer localized shipping, personalized discounts and prices etc with StoreHippo and ready your e-pharmacy business for an upward growth trajectory.

You can also enable your customers to place their medicine orders in multiple languages on your multi vendor marketplace with the multilingual feature from StoreHippo. You can quickly translate the content on your ecommerce store into 100+ languages including RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic. 

Set up location-based promotions 

With increased incidences of chronic illnesses and better life-expectancy, medicine consumption has increased significantly. . Patients make repeat medicine purchases regularly to maintain a healthy lifestyle. In such scenarios it becomes your responsibility to ensure that they return to your e-pharma store to refill their prescriptions. And how to do that? Well, you can start by offering locations-based discounts and offers. Targeted marketing has time and again proved to be effective especially for a hyperlocal ecommerce system when you have customers in your vicinity! 

With StoreHippo multi vendor marketplace solutions, you can boost your targeted marketing efforts by creating special coupon codes and discounts for all your location based e-pharma stores. StoreHippo comes with a powerful in-built discount engine that helps you offer multi-level discounts like flat or percentage-based discounts for products, collections, categories, user groups, device-specific audiences and more. You can also recover abandoned carts by automated follow-ups like real-time notifications or personalized calls. This way you can easily reach out to specific audience groups rather than a generalized marketing effort. 

Offer a seamless checkout flow 

The one thing that refrains customers from making a purchase is long complex checkout processes. Yes, when you fail to offer a seamless checkout process, customers walk away from your online medicine delivery business. 

StoreHippo offers a full spectrum of digital payment solutions for your e-pharma business. With 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways, you can provide your customers with ease of paying and choice of using their preferred payment options. With StoreHippo, you can also implement multiple payment gateways based on the location or device of the buyers.

Align with hyperlocal delivery solutions

Almost 52% of online shoppers said that delivery speed influenced their purchase decisions. Yes, customers expect their medicines to be delivered as quickly as possible.

With StoreHippo, you can boost your conversions by enabling location-based hyperlocal commerce delivery solutions. You can choose from 30+ shipping partners or add your custom local shipping solution to offer quick delivery on your online pharmacy business. With the built-in delivery management solutions from StoreHippo, you can seamlessly manage your own fleet of delivery boys and create a seamless supply chain. You can also set up rules to implement shipping charges, delivery timings etc. based on IP-detection of customer location.            

Go live and start selling 

Once your online pharmacy marketplace is all set, you can seamlessly start selling medicines online. However, it is best to do a live test of your multi vendor marketplace before making it available to your customers. It gives you the window to fix any bugs (if there).

Conclusion

With the rising demand for quick deliveries of medicines and related products, it is important to keep focus on hyperlocal commerce solutions. StoreHippo and its enterprise-grade features helps you create unique and conversion-oriented multi vendor marketplaces for your e-pharmacy business.

You can seamlessly match pace with the changing buyer behaviour and keep your e-pharmacy customers engaged and happy.  StoreHippo helps you make your online medicine delivery brand future-proof by offering 360-degree solutions for growth.

All set to build your hyperlocal pharmacy multi vendor marketplace with StoreHippo? Start your 14-day free trial now.