Taking Your Ordering Experience to the Next Level
Empower Customers & Streamline Processes by Enabling Real-Time Inventory & Ordering
Customers in all industries now expect the ability to place orders online. Even in complex purchasing situations, people think of smooth e-commerce experiences as the default.
That’s a big shift from how medtech companies have traditionally approached things. Some have moved from bulky printed catalogs to websites that showcase product details, but many still do not offer online ordering capabilities.
However, there are a lot of things to consider when making the move from a static site to a fully-enabled online ordering system. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the things you need to consider in the process.
Whether your company is taking on the work internally, or hiring external partners to handle the development, we recommend thinking through all of these items before proceeding.
1. What are your must-have features?
Before your developers can get started on the project or even give you an estimate, you’ll need to put together your business requirements document. This document should spell out all of your needs and requirements for your online ordering system.
Your business requirements document should contain all of the things your online ordering system needs to be considered a success. If there are certain features or functionalities that are desired, they should also be included in this document.
You might also want to provide examples of other e-commerce websites that you really like, even if they aren’t specific to the medtech industry. This can help your developers better visualize what you are looking for.
Examples of this might include:
- Specific ways you’d like customers to be able to filter products
- Information on how you’d like the products to be displayed and categorized
- The type of search functionality you’d like to have
- Your branding requirements
- The amount of information that needs to be included on each product listing
Why This Matters
Your developers want to ultimately deliver an online ordering system that meets your needs, and that you are delighted to launch (or at least, they should!).
You don’t have to figure out every detail of what you want the website to look like and how you want the online ordering system to function, but clarifying the things that you do know helps to ensure that your developers can work toward that goal and plan for it in their proposal.
2. Are there any internal hosting and management requirements to consider?
Another important part of putting together your requirements is explaining the technical requirements. Your company will likely have a specific tech stack for at least some things that your developers will need to work within.
These technical considerations might include:
- Hosting it on a specific platform, like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.
- Building your online ordering system within a specific programming language, framework, database architecture, or operating system
- Needing to integrate the online ordering capabilities with an existing web property
- The system you use to house and categorize your current inventory data
- The various systems your online ordering system might need to sync with
- Variability in product details and availability for different markets/customers/regions
Your company will likely have specific needs on most of these fronts, if not all, and it is crucial to consider all of that information before settling on a path forward.
Why This Matters
It’s important to spell out all of your technical needs so that you choose developers that can work within your requirements. There are a lot of variable skill sets required for each of these items, and not every development firm will have the skill sets needed to fit all of your requirements. Choosing a more versatile agency can be beneficial, especially if you have very specific technical requirements.
This information also helps your developers understand and plan within the limitations of your existing systems, so that you get the right solution to fit your specifications.
3. What should the ordering process look like?
The process of being able to place orders online will likely be one of the biggest shifts compared to how you currently approach things, so it’s especially critical to think this through in the planning phase.
The first part of this is planning for user accounts. Does your current website already have a user login feature that you would like to utilize? If not, what would you like the login process to look like? Additionally, you will need different types of user roles for both customers and your internal team. You may want to assign different roles to customers based on the types of products they need to purchase. For your internal team, you may need different roles for editing product information, processing orders, and administrators.
Additionally, you have to consider the type of data you will need to collect to fill orders, and if you have any external systems where this data would need to be pushed to, like your preferred enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This could also include notifications to key team members, so you will need to determine where notifications should be sent and what information they need to contain.
Finally, when it comes to completing and shipping out orders, you’ll likely need some sort of functionality that allows customers to see all of their orders and the status, as well as shipping information like tracking. You will need to decide what order information should be made available in user accounts to determine what solution will be needed to accomplish that.
Why This Matters
Since the ordering process is the primary reason for upgrading your site, it’s crucial to map out how you want this process to look. This will be a big shift in how you are handling orders, and you want to make sure that you are making things smoother for your customers and team than the current ordering processes, rather than adding additional headaches and frustration.
All of the different systems you are currently using to track information will also need to be considered for the solutions your developers propose to enable the online ordering functionality. It’s important to ensure that everything is accounted for in your development plan to help everything go smoothly on launch.
4. How will you handle payments, balances, and returns?
Whether or not your ordering website needs the ability to process payments will largely depend on how you handle payments now and if you want to continue to process payments that way. Is payment due at the time of order placement, or are customers invoiced at a later date?
If it’s the latter, you may not need the ability to process payments within your ordering system. However, it could still be useful to have the ability for customers to log in and pay their open invoices if it makes sense for your processes.
Another consideration if you are not collecting payments at the time of order placement is how to handle customers with past-due invoices. Should you build in the ability to flag or disable new orders for customers with overdue balances?
Finally, if equipment returns are a part of your company’s processes, you will want to determine if it makes sense for customers to initiate the return process within your online ordering system. While many online retailers do have the ability to initiate returns online, it may not make sense for all medical device or equipment companies, especially if your products do not require reprocessing. In those cases, you may want to just provide an email and/or phone number customers can use for assistance. If you do want to give customers the opportunity to initiate returns online, though, you will need to think through what steps need to happen to work within your protocols.
Why This Matters
Just like the ordering process, you want to make sure that the payment process does not add unnecessary burden or steps for your customers and your team. In cases where customer invoices are paid at a later date, there may be unintended consequences that arise if you don’t plan out the payment process and determine how you will flag past-due accounts.
While you will, of course, want to make sure your team has oversight into orders, payments, and returns, the ultimate goal with an online ordering system is to alleviate some of that burden on your team and your customers. Getting the right systems in place will help your team keep these processes running smoothly and allow them to focus on the things that require their intervention.
The Importance of Thorough Planning for Online Ordering Systems
While the end goal of an online ordering system is to make it easier for your customers to place orders and for your team to manage the ordering process, there are a lot of really complex things that need to happen behind the scenes to enable that functionality.
Whether you only have a handful of products and need a relatively simple system, or you have a large and diverse range of products that require complex, Amazon-like search functions in addition to ordering capabilities, you will likely have other systems and software that need to connect with your online ordering system to keep the process running smoothly.
Figuring out all of these details ahead of time will help you choose the right developers for your needs. It also helps to determine what kind of budget you might need for your project, and whether you can fit all of your requirements into the first version, or if you need to take a more iterative approach over a longer period of time. It can help you prioritize the “needs” versus the “nice-to-haves.” Finally, it helps you stay on track with timelines and budgets, as you should have fewer surprises or roadblocks arise when you have planned everything out ahead of time.
While it may require a lot of planning upfront, this will ultimately help the development process go much smoother for everyone.
About Health Connective
For over 25 years, Health Connective has partnered with medtech companies to build custom applications that help engage customers, streamline purchasing, and cut administrative burden for sales and marketing teams.
When “off-the-shelf” software doesn’t cut it, we develop customized solutions that provide the functionality our customers need in a visually-appealing way. We work hand-in-hand with I.T., R&D, marketing, and product teams to ensure their needs are resolved while meeting the company’s technical requirements.
