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click past. Make no mistake, model 3 is the territory of dedicated players.
Understand Scale and Marketing
HME providers have traditionally traded on a reputa- tion for product and care expertise, and particularly at the local level. That has been their sweet spot and the value that they bring to the home medical supplies and equipment market. Most people would reasonably look at the global reach of e-commerce, and conclude that the business model would be very different. A provider could easily be bowled over by a massive surge in demand.
Bearing that in mind, providers should start out identify two or three products they can offer online and consider how well those products can scale quickly
if the provider sees some initial success. Can they get enough from their vendors? Are their vendors con dent they can maintain that supply? And then the provider needs to think of the next two or three or products
that can translate well to e-commerce. This gives the provider the ability to ramp up.
But the provider can also control it reach through marketing. The Internet is not an out-of-control rehose when it comes to e-commerce; it is a spigot. By controlling your marketing, you can control your exposure.
Even though the web gives providers national reach, they can y under the radar and limit their exposure. Since there are so many players online, if a provider decides to focus geographically, the rest of the world will likely see other businesses, while the provider is chie y visible to just its local market.
In fact, online marketing can be as highly targeted as it can be global. So if a provider actively pursues an online marketing initiative that targets people in certain zip codes and on certain keywords around very focused types of medical equipment, then it will nd those people and those customers will nd that provider.
Adapting to Customers
Next up, providers must start to focus on how they will build out the actual e-commerce interface. This is where the provider really needs to do a deep dive with a service provider. Experience is everything. Just like in the way providers want their customers’ in-store experience to feel like any other brick-and-mortar retail establishment, they want their customer-facing e-commerce offering to feel like any other.
In tandem with that effort, the HME provider
needs to work with its e-commerce vendor to consider how the payments are going to be handled and how they will work with the business’s back end. They want to address whether or not transactions will be strictly credit card handled via the provider’s existing processing company, or not, and how everything will be tied together in terms of accounting systems.
But there’s another important element of the customer experience: being exible. Too many providers think in black-and-white terms when it comes to e-commerce — it either takes place in-store or online. Frankly, that line of thinking is off the mark.
If anything, e-commerce can be a blend of both, Health Mobius’s Haddad explains.
Providers should ask themselves, why can’t e-commerce serve as an easy-to-access cash register? For instance, when a service tech is in the eld making a delivery, that tech could assess the home and suggest some appropriate retail items kept in the truck. From
that point forward, the tech could handle the retail transaction via an iPad or similar device.
“What we’re trying to do, even though we are an e-commerce company, is we’re trying to rephrase it into the cash register or point of sale in providers’ hands,” Haddad explains. “It’s more consistent with the retail mentality. It’s the same product at the end of the day.” n
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