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A Detailed Guide to Pharmacy Website Design and Development with eCommerce and Telemedicine Features in the US

In the past few years, ordering medicine and receiving care online have become very common among patients in the USA.

Sensing the change in consumer behavior, several pharmacies have digitized their presence. However, thousands of local pharmacies still operate only brick-and-mortar stores.

If you are one of them, you will find this blog very interesting as we will discuss everything you need to know to create a pharmacy website for your drug store with some game-changing features.

Why Do Patients Prefer to Access Pharmacy Services Online?

The idea of ordering medicine and receiving care online is really convenient, especially for old age and disabled people as well as parents and working professionals as they do not need to wait in a queue and find the dedicated time.

The following are the other reasons.

why patients use online pharmacy

1. Affordable Care

By ordering medicine and receiving care online, patients eliminate their need for travelling and taking dedicated time out from their work.

This results in indirect cost savings.

2. Multiple Choices

Patients have the flexibility to choose between multiple online pharmacies and hundreds of listed healthcare providers.

In offline practice, patients never receive such flexibility.

3. Market Trend

It is not just medicine, there are all essential items available online.

After utilizing online services as part of the compulsion during the period of the pandemic, people now get habituated to prioritizing online services over offline services.

4. 360-Degree Care Solution

Several modern and popular pharmacy stores have rolled out telemedicine services from their existing online pharmacy platforms.

With this, patients are now able to access both primary care and pharmacy services from a single platform.

There are multiple other reasons.

However, all reasons lead to a simple conclusion – people opt more for online pharmacy services as it is affordable, convenient, and rapid.

Why is it Beneficial to Have Your Own Pharmacy Website?

In simple terms – owning a pharmacy website for a pharmacy store is a matter of survival!

Benefits of online pharmacy

1. Getting More Customers

One of the biggest advantages of having an online pharmacy is getting a larger audience.

You can increase your customer base by interacting with them, offering them personalized deals and you can turn them into loyal customers.

2. Brand Recognition

Most importantly, It will help create a brand image for your pharmacy store.

The more market you capture, the more trust you will have in the customer and the more value you create for the brand.

This will help with customer retention.

3. Reduced Infrastructure Cost

In this digital era, users or patients don’t prefer to go out (especially after COVID), and providing them what they want at the doorstep will benefit them as well as a pharmacy.

Yes, pharmacies can dramatically reduce their infrastructure cost as they now only require a small operational center and a warehouse.

4. Profitable Business

Relying on other medicine delivery companies won’t get you much of a profit since they have a higher commission rate.

Making something of your own is very important when you want to capture the local market and make loyal customers.

5. Online Marketing

There are endless possibilities to grow the business with the help of digital marketing.

Growing the business is completely in your hands.

With the help of digital and social media marketing, you can increase your customer base.

What is the Process of Creating a Website for Pharmacy?

There is a very common misconception that building a website, web app, or mobile app is only about coding.

But that’s not true.

Coding is only 20% of the pharmacy website development process.

The remaining 80% of the process includes discovery, documentation, workflows, UI/UX, coding, testing, piloting, and lastly launching.

Let us explain each phase of the process in better detail.

1) Discovery

The discovery phase is more focused on requirement gathering, assessing the requirements, finding new possibilities, setting up the KPIs, and planning execution.

2) Documentation

From features to compliance requirements, everything gets documented here.

This document is very important even after the launch of the pharmacy website.

3) Workflows

How users interact with your pharmacy website and how you drive their user journey forward define the success of the pharmacy website.

Thus, it is mandatory to define the workflows and create a pharmacy website according to those workflows.

4) UI/UX

If you skip this, your pharmacy website ends up as a disaster.

Because the website’s UI/UX is the first thing that users notice.

A good UI/UX inspires users, gives good vibes of the company and helps you earn user trust by representing your brand.

5) Coding

Based on the UI/UX provided by the designers, developers code the website.

Out of all phases of pharmacy website development, the development or coding phase continues for months.

6) Testing

QA testers now take over.

They utilize manual and automated testing approaches and test the built website to find out bugs in it.

Here it is worth mentioning that it is never feasible to build a 100% bug-free website or app.

7) Piloting

The ready website is presented to you as a whole and provides you with basic training to perform operations from its admin panel.

8) Launch

Your pharmacy website is finally made live for users.

📌 You must also read: How to start online pharmacy in USA?

The Differences You Must Know Between Website, Web App, and Mobile App

When you decide to take your pharmacy online, you do have a choice to choose between a website, web app, and mobile app.

So, here is a quick comparison.

Web App

A web app is the advanced version of a website.

Like a website, it opens on web browsers but supports all advanced features.

It supports some features like mobile apps such as notifications, background updates, database integration, etc.

Website

A website is limited to only content.

It contains information about pharmacy in graphical and textual format.

It does not support some useful features required to run pharmacy operations online such as order tracking, inventory management, separate user/admin/pharmacy sign, etc.

Mobile App

A mobile app is the superior one.

It has a very large scope of innovation and supports all advanced features that take user experience to the next level.

To access it, you have to install it from either the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

What to Choose Between a Website, Web App, and Mobile App for Your Pharmacy?

Decide this carefully as this one decision will define your budget and the success of your attempt to digitize your pharmacy.

You Should Go for Website

  • If your agenda is to just share your pharmacy information with your customers
  • If you have a very low investment cap – below $5K

You Should Go for the Web App

  • If your agenda is to provide online pharmacy services to users such as medicine delivery, online prescription refills, telemedicine, etc.
  • If you have a medium investment cap

You Should Go for the Mobile App

  • If you’re looking for a future-ready product for your pharmacy
  • If you want to deliver an exceptional user experience to the users
  • If you want to set your pharmacy apart
  • If you have a medium-high investment cap

Features that You Should Add to Your Online Pharmacy Platform

Before we move ahead, let us clarify that the majority of these features are only supported by a web app and a mobile app and not a website.

User-Centric Features

  • User profile
  • Smart search
  • Drug information
  • Drug comparison
  • eCommerce platform
  • Payment
  • Prescription transfer
  • Prescription renewal
  • Order tracking
  • Reviews & feedback
  • Live chat support

Pharmacy-Centric Features

  • Customer management
  • Product management
  • Pricing management
  • Referral and loyalty program
  • Promo codes management
  • Inventory management
  • Staff management
  • Sales report
  • Customer support
  • Payment management
  • Analytics

📌 Explore our solution on: Pharmacy inventory management software

Why Should You Also Add Telemedicine Features to Your Online Pharmacy Platform?

To survive in a highly competitive market, it is crucial to generate multiple revenue streams and build a large user base.

By adding telemedicine features and rolling out virtual care services through your pharmacy solution, you can achieve both.

The following are the top benefits of building a telemedicine-enabled pharmacy platform.

  • Adding telemedicine costs you less as you already have IT infrastructure for an online pharmacy. (You don’t have to build it from scratch to support telemedicine.)
  • It enables patients to receive care and medicine from a single platform. This matters the most!
  • You end up building a large user base.
  • You successfully generate one more profitable revenue stream.
  • Your pharmacy’s market value will increase as you now cater to multiple healthcare services.

We Deal with Complex Pharmacy Technology Every Day. Building a Web or Mobile App for Pharmacy is a Cakewalk for us!

We’re an Ontario-based healthcare-focused IT company.

Being a healthcare-focused IT company, we perform the role of technology partner for providers, pharmacies, startups, and enterprises.

We have been serving the North American healthcare industry for more than 8 years and one unique thing we have successfully delivered is peace of mind to providers.

Several providers are saving crucial clinical hours and delivering quality care with our healthcare IT expertise and passion.

We work backstage.

But the result is visible to the world.

We empower the entire healthcare industry with the tech knowledge we have earned.

And we will continue doing this until all patients can access affordable, rapid, and quality care with zero effort.

If you have a similar vision, we can seriously bring a change – with your clinical presence and with our healthcare IT passion!

Want to save 70% cost on development? Explore our white-label pharmacy app