Online Product Catalog
Purchasing medical devices is not like buying a book from Barnes & Noble. On the surface, all online catalogs appear to leverage the same technology. At the core, however, they are solving very different problems.
Complex product interdependence was the defining challenge in building an online catalog for a medical technology company. Accessible to both sales representatives and customers, the new online catalog would need to replace a cumbersome print catalog with a searchable, always-up-to-date interface. But with device kits composed of many individual parts, the team needed a scalable solution that preserved the relationships between a diverse set of components.
Leveraging Health Connective’s medtech expertise, our development team designed a custom platform that addressed not only the product-relationship challenge, but several considerations that may not exist in other sectors. The key features included:
Project Online Product Catalog
Customer
Description A searchable, responsive online catalog that can manage a complex product hierarchy
Product Alignment
Whether users search for an individual part or a product kit, the online catalog finds and displays all the related equipment. A typical, non-healthcare approach to online catalogs is to treat every product SKU as a discrete item—a fatal mistake that would have required starting from scratch when the error was discovered.
Multiple Search Filters
Users can drill down to search for products by kit, part, product name, product number, procedure type—even competitor codes. Several custom parameters enable sales representatives and customers to access the catalog data however it is most meaningful to them.
Fast Page Load
Healthcare is not exempt from the frictionless online experience users have come to expect. Our team worked to ensure that the infrastructure required to support product interdependence was not permitted to slow down performance. According to Google, the consumer bounce rate increases 32% between 1 second and 3 seconds of page load time.1 Amazon famously calculated that it loses $1.6 billion in sales annually for every extra second it takes a page to load.2
Intelligent Search
A built-in system for common typos and misspellings helps users consistently find the results they are expecting. Even bar codes and pin codes were reviewed for accessibility. The entire system was designed to facilitate search without becoming so “helpful” as to inadvertently impede it.
1 Think with Google page load time statistics. Accessed July 1, 2021, at Page load time statistics – Think with Google
2 “Vrooom! Why Website Speed Matters,” Brian Sutter. May 19, 2019, Entrepreneur. Accessed July 2, 2021 at Vrooom! Why Website Speed Matters. (entrepreneur.com)
Used daily by sales reps and customers alike, the online catalog drives both new business and cost savings. In addition to simplifying the ordering process for customers, it eliminated the significant expense associated with maintaining a printed catalog. The online catalog is also scalable and can be easily extended for implementation by other departments.
Health Connective’s online product catalog can also be expanded to include ecommerce. The platform was built to support full shopping cart functionality, modeled after Amazon with some of the most sophisticated tools available. It can be activated quickly as soon as the team is ready to take the next step.
The team we worked with said that every other business unit within the company is jealous of how good their catalog is.
– Justin Bantuelle, Health Connective
