HME/DME Product Distribution, Order Fulfillment, And Customer Service Are The New Standard

Think about this, for a retailer to have an e-commerce presence, somebody has to be manning that website. Somebody has to be replying to customers and most retailers don’t have dedicated staff specifically for responding to emails right away or to engage with customers using the website chatbots.

So, the service that we provide includes a quick-response time during business hours and includes that online chat. So when a customer has a question, in today’s day and age, they expect a reply quickly. Keep in mind, the reason people shop at online stores is that of convenience. So just building the Webstore is not enough. You have to make it convenient for your customers to purchase, this includes good response rates online.  So, consider the costs involved with having somebody manage that pain in the ass website, handle the customer service, reply quickly, keep inventory updated etc, it all requires your resources.

So what we’ve been able to do is consolidate the fundamentals that we all need to stay alive and thrive. When you subscribe to our service, we give you literally everything you need to make money selling medical supplies online in a way that’s professional and allows your business to compete with Amazon.

Customer Service consolidated into our customer service center and we’re able to identify that caller or that person on chat is coming from “John Doe’s Pretty Good Pharmacy”.  We’re able to respond to them as if we are an extension of your customer service department.

The HME / DME Industry Was Not Ready For E-Commerce

A number of dealers in this industry have been sold on the idea that they need to build this great massive website and that it needs to have certain bells and whistles.  And in many cases, they are building websites that don’t even have real e-commerce and yet they’ve just paid a lot of money for them. And then the companies that build these websites are handing the keys over to the dealers to take over managing these websites and in many cases, the dealers have no background in websites and try to figure things out on the fly.

What we’ve done in this industry is we’ve sold these guys on the idea that they need a website to compete online, which is accurate. But we’re failing to understand that although we’ve now given them access to the website and the tools to manage the site and be successful, in reality, the core issue is not the website. It’s that they don’t have the resources to manage that website properly, to handle the day-to-day online operations.

It’s not enough to just build the car because now the business owner has to spend their time and energy driving it around when really what they need is a chauffeur that can drive them around while they work in the passenger seat. They don’t need a car. They need to get from Point A to Point B.

Let’s assume in 2018 that there were 100,000 ½-inch drill bits that were sold in the United States. Do you know how many of those people actually needed a ½-inch drill bits? Zero. Nobody needed a ½-inch drill bit.  What they needed was a ½-inch hole. That’s what they needed. And that’s what we miss in this industry.

In this industry. we’re trying to teach these guys how to how to go in and run an e-commerce website and that’s not their business, for the most part anyway, right?

Some people want to learn the business and get into it and by all means, that’s fine in which case the Webstore may not be what we provide for them. They can use still use us as a supplier. But what we’re trying to do is train these guys to be e-commerce operators when their business is not set up for that.