Medical supplies e-commerce solution

Medical e-commerce: Challenges and opportunities

At Sana Commerce, we understand the challenges, as well as trends and opportunities for medical and pharmaceuticals e-commerce — whether you’re manufacturing medicines and medical supplies, distributing PPE and medical devices, developing new healthcare solutions, or beyond.

Needs and challenges in medical commerce

Strict industry regulations and restrictions
Critical need for providing customers with accurate product information and extensive documentation
Medicine expiry dates, shortages, delays and wastage
Amazon entering the healthcare market
Government and insurance agencies challenging pharma pricing
Complex buying journeys, long supply chains and manual data entry, impacting reliability and increasing error rates
Managing multiple sales channels, from EDI to online and offline channels

Trends and opportunities for medical supplies e-commerce

Prioritizing customer convenience in addition to reliability: 79% of B2B buyers in the medical industry want to access product and inventory information online
Taking your cut of the billion-dollar (and growing) online medical supplies market
Harnessing automation to speed up the buying process, shorten lead times and maximize efficiency, while reducing errors and wastage
Jumping on D2C and B2B2C medical trends
Building a flexible operating structure to quickly adapt to market changes, such as the COVID-19 outbreak

By 2023, the online medical supplies market is predicted to grow to $11 billion, with more competitors emerging every year, including e-commerce giant Amazon. Get ahead of The Amazon Effect in medical e-commerce with our guide to selling pharma and medical supplies online.

Get the free guide

Sana Commerce: Convenient, reliable and evolving e-commerce solution

Medical and healthcare e-commerce platform

Looking for an e-commerce solution where reliability and compliance doesn’t come at the price of customer convenience and evolution? Our Sana Commerce platform checks all these boxes, without any compromise. How? We make your SAP or Microsoft Dynamics ERP and e-commerce work as one. This means that we can automatically show the data and logic you’ve built in your ERP on your web store, without duplication, disruptions, delays or manual synchronization. We also bring extensive expertise in medical e-commerce and its specialist requirements.

So, if you already manage all your data and logic in your ERP, you’ll not only benefit from unprecedented efficiency, but also from improved customer relationships through the following 3 key benefits:

Total customer convenience

Empower your customers with personalized self-service and complete transparency, while remaining compliant with medical industry standards:

Hyper-personalized web store: Customer-specific pricing, sales agreements, invoices, online and offline order history, custom products and more personalization are all available out of the box.
Documentation portal: Give customers direct access to product manuals and pharma leaflets. And allow buyers to validate their web store registration and/or individual orders by submitting their own documentations and certifications through the web store.
Product grouping: Group and filter products based on strengths and dosage, so customers can easily find the medicines they need.
Roles, authorizations and user rights: Multiple users from a single organization — such as a large hospital — can be divided into different roles. From contract viewers to order approvers, each user can then only access the information and functionalities for which they are authorized.

Reliability without compromise

Deliver a reliable online experience and eliminate errors, to deliver the right products quickly, which can make all the difference for medical professionals and their patients:

Real-time inventory information: Thanks to e-commerce and ERP working as one, your web store only lets you sell what’s available in the ERP, with inventory levels updated in real time.
Expiry date information: Show the correct expiry date for each medicine product batch directly on your site.
Elimination of errors: No silos in data, errors in orders or missing orders thanks to ERP and e-commerce working as one.
No delayed delivery: Real-time ERP integration speeds up the ordering process and ensures you deliver the right pharma and medical supplies at the promised time.
Accurate information: Even when your customer places an on-demand, custom product order, the web store displays the correct delivery time and pricing based on the ERP logic.
Omnichannel experience: Provide the same information across all sales channels, from web store to phone and EDI.

Constant evolution

Quickly adapt your business to meet your customers’ evolving expectations and the latest medical industry trends, such as the shift from B2B to D2C and B2B2C, or changes in demand following major outbreaks:

Fast go-to-market: Easily add new product lines to react to new demands or to expand your portfolio of medical supplies.
Open new web stores: Whether you want to expand to a new market or embrace a new business model, you can choose what ERP information is visible tailored to each web store.
Adapt to changing healthcare legislation: Once you make the change in your ERP, the same logic will be immediately applied to your web store without any disruption.
Add new functionalities: Easily add new functionalities and add-ons, such as new payment types, according to your customers’ latest needs.

… And more!

See our platform in action

We have fewer individual products, fewer suppliers, and a shorter lead time with less inventory. That means less risk. We now have an extremely stable environment that helps us reach our goals.

Gani Gashi | Manager of Finance, Controlling and IT at Zorgservice XL

We wanted something efficient and easy to manage, so we chose Sana Commerce because of the integration with our ERP. Since then, Fagron has launched 14 sales portals in multiple countries: 12 of which were launched in a year’s time. Now, 40% of Fagron’s global sales orders are completed online.

Karel Jutte | Global Application Portfolio Manager at Fagron

Sana Commerce stood out because of how it’s layered on top of our Microsoft Dynamics ERP, to the point that it’s almost part of Dynamics AX. [Getting the right data to our web store] doesn’t require a push; it’s calling directly into our ERP. That, and the pricing made sense, so Sana Commerce was the right fit for us.

Bryan Belanger | VP of Technology at Ideal Protein

Want to learn more about launching a medical e-commerce solution with Sana Commerce?

Schedule a free consultancy call with one of our industry experts

Get in touch

E-commerce for the medical supplies industry