The Early Days And Organic Growth Of Health Mobius

We should define what it is that Health Mobius does and how we got here because I think this is really important. Our roots are in the distribution business. We started in the direct to consumer business and then got into distribution.

So, we understood those two things very well. As our business grew and our distribution business grew, we developed a nice customer base of HME DME dealers that would ask us to drop ship products to customers, either to the store for customer pick up or to their customers directly.

So, big deal, drop shippers are a dime a dozen. There’s a ton of them. McKesson has a great home delivery program, for example.  What is it about us that’s different from everybody else? For starters, everybody else seems to focus on the top-selling five or ten SKUs from a manufacturer whereas we tend to concentrate on the entire product line. So we may only stock the five or ten, but our catalog includes the entire depth of the line from that manufacturer.

So, that means if you want a top-selling item, we have it and we can ship it same-day. If you want something from the middle tier or the bottom tier we do have it in our catalog. We can order it from the manufacturer and have drop-shipped to you. So that’s been our specialty for a number of years.

Reducing Friction In The Buying Process, For Everybody

What we found is that our customer was placing an order with us so that we can then ship the order to the customer and then the customer had to a go in and in and handle the financial transaction with their retail customer.

So we thought well, how do we knock out one of the steps? And the way we knocked it out was, we took our own e-commerce site and we private-labeled it for each individual HME/DME dealer. Then, in addition to that, what we did is we changed the pricing to retail pricing instead of wholesale pricing. So, what we’re able to do is to provide our HME/DME dealers their own e-commerce store with their name on it, their contact information. Our customer service running in the background, our product inventory in the entire store, and we’re able to publish the store and attach it to their existing website. Very easily. It takes less than a day to get this all accomplished.  

A patient comes in and places an order. The order gets processed. We immediately send out the order confirmations, shipping is done. All of the email confirmations, picking and packing products, all of the accounting at the end of the month, all the sales tax collection and the sales tax reporting is all done on our end.

Your job is to direct customers into the store to make purchases.  Our job is to do all that work and at the end of the month, send you a report with the details including every customer, what was purchased, what the retail selling price is, what the costs are, and what your net payout is on that transaction.

Creating A Better Buying Experience Increases HME/DME’s Value

So, that’s what we do. We are your backend customer service team for your store. We’re your back end IT team to run the e-commerce department of your company and we’re your back end distribution source buying group that handles that entire operation.

I’ve got retail locations or showrooms, what are some of the things that I can do and what does Health Mobius do to help with converting that foot traffic into online sales?

First of all, the Webstore can function on it’s own. So somebody from the privacy of their own home can access your website, click on the Webstore to shop online, it’ll open up into the Webstore powered by Health Mobius.

Our recommendation or best practice, if you will, would be that every customer service rep in the store has access to a tablet or walks around with a tablet. So that the minute you have a customer in the store, and they’re inquiring about something, you can very easily go to the Webstore and navigate to the respective section.

Let’s say somebody’s coming in to by a wheelchair. Great, you have that in stock and you can make that sale. You can also open up the tablet, take them to the wheelchair accessories and show him the cushions, show them the cup holders, show them the specialty rain ponchos. These are the additional cash sale items that somebody who comes in to get a wheelchair is going to need these accessories.

Bath safety items. Another best practice to have is for your driver’s. You’re doing delivery into people’s homes, train your staff to do a free bath safety assessment, where they can do an assessment in the bathroom and then, again, show them on a tablet the bath transfer benches, grab bars, raised toilet seats, shampoo basins, alarms, if they fall out of bed.

So our emphasis is you’ve got a customer that’s come to you to purchase X or has insurance reimbursement for X what additional buying options are they going to have to make from somewhere from Amazon from another online retailer, or from you. How do we direct that to you?