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

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.

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

In offline practice, patients never receive such flexibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

From features to compliance requirements, everything gets documented here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Your pharmacy website is finally made live for users.

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.

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.

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.

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

• 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

• 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

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

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

• 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.