Marketplace

This is a healthcare marketplace created for online sales between pharmacies and customers. This platform offers seamless and fast interaction and provides numerous opportunities to improve the experience of all sales participants.

Our customer wanted us to create a helpful and feature-rich platform for a convenient sales process.

One of the most demanding tasks was to make the platform fully customizable to the needs of different vendors. After the discussion, we decided on the desired functionality.

• Advanced search options
• Geolocation integration
• Functional interface for vendors
• Fast and seamless order processing
• Order, employee, and inventory management
• Implement a convenient fill-out form for clients
• Sales monitoring tools
• Mobile-friendly solution

This is how we dealt with all the challenges. The development process started almost two years ago and is still in progress, as we developed this platform from scratch.

This marketplace is a B2B product, so we paid much attention to the business side. When pharmacies choose to cooperate with this marketplace, they get access to numerous helpful functions.

Pharmacy owners or employees can view all the orders and filter them based on date, price, pharmacy (if it is a chain), status, etc.

Owners can add up to 10 pharmacies from one chain, create employee profiles, define their responsibilities, and give access to certain functionality. They can make instant updates on delivery and payment status and the order status is generated automatically based on them.

Besides, we included:

• Chat with the customers
• E-mail generation
• Real-time sales statistics
• Automatic receipt generation

Admin panel is full of customizable elements

• logo
• description
• working hours
• delivery hours
• shipping options
• payment options

We integrated PayPal API for fast and secure payments. The location of each pharmacy is defined automatedly with the Google Maps API.

Vendors can easily add new items into different categories. All the information is added automatically after importing the unique product code. This is possible with the integration with ABDATA Pharma Data Service.

For interaction with customers, our main aim was to provide seamless interaction opportunities via intuitive and highly functional UI.

We realized that developing a search system was a significant task. It is the very first thing the customers see on the platform and it had to work perfectly.

Customers can easily search for a pharmacy:

• Based on their location via Google Maps API integration
• By postal code, address, pharmacy name
• By viewing the map with the pharmacies within 5 km

Except for location-based search, users can apply such filters:

• Opened now
• Customer rating

Another challenging task was to add all the necessary information about pharmacies and medicine and not overload the UI with unnecessary elements that will influence the website’s usability.

While searching pharmacies, the customer sees the working hours, distance, rating, and delivery options right away.

On the pharmacy page, the customers see the main product categories, discounts, and top products. They can:

• filter the medicine by symptoms
• search by product name, producer name
• sort the results by price, name, and top-selling items
• add the product to the cart instantly
• chat with a pharmacy

In one click, customers can access extensive information about a certain item.

For seamless shopping experience, we developed a shopping cart with convenient functionality:

• separate shopping carts for different pharmacies
• purchasing without registering an account
• choosing suitable payment and shipping options
• automated email generating
• chat with a pharmacy

Processing an order takes a few clicks through a well-thought customer journey. Making an order is fast, whereas it involves all the necessary steps. 

For registered users the functionality is wider:

• Uploading doctor’s prescription (if necessary)
• Bonuses and discounts from favorite pharmacies
• Writing reviews on products and pharmacy services
• Viewing order history

For the back-end, we opted for .NET Core 3.1 that enabled implementing substantial functionality for the admin and the customer panels. For greater scalability and flexibility, we followed the microservice approach and employed Docker containers.

The main page required a technology beneficial for promoting the website. That’s why we chose an ASP.NET Core MVC framework for Frontend. It enables enhanced website relevance and better interaction with search engine algorithms by server-side rendering.The Gateway upfront on Web API helped us improve the interactions of the Front and Backend by creating a single communication point.

For the fast and reliable Admin part, we decided to use Angular 8 This framework enabled building an extensive and complex single-page app that worked smoothly. A cross-platform mobile application for Android and iOS was built on Xamarin. This is an optimal choice to integrate an app with most mobile devices, boost the development process, and maintain the product easily. 

As the development result, we received a feature-rich platform that facilitates the cooperation between pharmacies and customers. It combines extensive customizable functionality and an intuitive interface. For now, the marketplace cooperates with different pharmacies and pharmacy chains and helps them reach more potential customers and increased income.