How to Start Hyperlocal Ecommerce Portal for Health Services

Have second thoughts if a hyperlocal ecommerce portal for health services is a good idea? Here’s what can bring you hope!

The growth story of Practo

The beginning of the Practo success story was a slow one. Back then in 2008, when the company was launched, people hardly believed in the concept of having health services and doctors’ consultations online. 

But soon in three years, the quarter on quarter growth for Practo accounted from 50% to 100%. Today, the company manages up to 2 crore patients a month and over 100,000 doctors.

So, you see an online portal for health services is not a bad idea! Even though a lot of similar players are kicking in with novel ideas from time to time, going hyperlocal for healthcare services is still a very less explored niche with immense potential. 

So do you also want to be a one-stop solution for any healthcare need? 

The good news is that your customers are just everywhere! With more and more people shifting to digital for everything, offering them health services online can be a lucrative idea! By creating a unique network of different healthcare providers, you can facilitate patients with online consultations within your vicinity. 

While Practo has now gone global and is far from being hyperlocal, you can get inspired and connect with healthcare professionals in and around the city. With the help of an ecommerce platform, you can start a hyperlocal ecommerce portal in no time. 

StoreHippo ecommerce platform is an all-round solution to support your business idea. With its modern-age features to systematically manage partners and patients, it can make your portal the most-preferred option for all medical-related needs. 

How to start hyperlocal ecommerce portal for health services

1.Invite partners from diverse geolocations 

Once you have acquired legitimate papers to run a portal for medical and healthcare services, you will need to list partners from diverse geolocations. 

Unlike goods and services where a multi-vendor store prefers sellers from the vicinity, your portal is free to explore more boundaries. 

Doctors and medical professional consultations can easily be carried out online. Sometimes, apart from a physical appointment, most advice can be sought through digital consultations. Hence, for a medical portal, you can on-board partners from certain extended locations too. 

The biggest takeaway here is to list reliable and trusted medical practitioners to create a reputation amongst your customers. 

2. Create location-based healthcare sub stores

Imagine if you were to create physical clinics for specific problems and cater to different audience groups spread across different localities. It would be just impossible to scale! 

With hyperlocal ecommerce this can be easily achieved! As the admin of the portal, you can tackle the issue of reaching out to customers across various geolocations by creating a series of sub stores. You can also create sub stores for pharmacy and lab services too! 

StoreHippo multi-store ecommerce helps you create multiple sub stores and you can categorise each one depending upon location or treatment. You can also design different and unique storefronts for each of the sub stores, centrally manage all your doctors’ data and list of healthcare services from a single dashboard. 

Thus creation of location-based stores will help you cater to more audience groups. What’s more? You can also tweak consultation charges depending upon the area and offer location-specific discounts and offers. 

3. Connect with patients in the native language

It is very important to connect with patients in their native language especially when they are looking for some comfort and information. If your portal can enable them to access your content in their preferred language then it can be a whole lot easier to; 

• Book appointments
• Read useful health-related information
• Fill out forms 
• Subscribe to offers 

Also, patients can have an overall sense of satisfaction and would want to to revisit the portal to continue future medical appointments. 

StoreHippo offers a multi-language feature using which you can auto change the language of the entire content in one click. With your content changed into more than 100 different languages in just one click, you can establish better patient-consultant communication and minimise language barriers. 

4. Create an app for better accessibility

Reaching out to healthcare professionals through smartphones could be so much more convenient than other devices. More so, when a patient wants a hasty appointment or there is an emergency. 

The mobile-first technology builds your online portal keeping in consideration all screen sizes. This means once you create your website, you do not need to duplicate it into a mobile version. 

StoreHippo not only offers the mobile-first approach technology but also lets you build a Progressive Web App for your hyperlocal ecommerce portal. 

A PWA is to be accessed on the web browser just like a normal website but it provides native app-like experience to the users. This is so much convenient since PWAs are accessible from customers’ home screens and also during low or zero internet connectivity. 

Besides this, StoreHippo also enables you to create Android or iOS apps without additional coding or cost. 

5. Integrate pharmacy stores and labs

A full-blown medical portal means you can offer customers various facilities right from the comfort of their homes. This includes providing them in-house online consultations, assisting them with lab testing services and making medicines available at their door-steps. 

How do you think this can be achieved? Well, you can integrate your portal with different medical stores or laboratories that can provide services to customers at their door-steps. 

You can integrate partners from different geolocations and cover a vast area to reach out to more patients across the city for your hyperlocal ecommerce. 

StoreHippo with its easy integrations enables you to connect to various partners for the same. You can easily manage them from the backend by providing your partners with individual dashboards to organise their patient records, data, appointments and more. 

6. Target customers and offer location-based discounts

You cannot expect your store to become a local favourite just by listing partners and services. You will need to have considerable traffic from people across different geo-locations. 

Targeted marketing seems to be more effective especially for a hyperlocal ecommerce system when you have customers in your vicinity! 

By creating multiple stores spread across various geolocations, you can target your customers based on specific demands and needs. You can also come up with attractive offers and discounts on these location-based stores to achieve maximum ROI on your marketing efforts. 

StoreHippo gives boost to your targeted marketing effort by letting you create special coupon codes and discounts for all your location based stores. This way you can easily reach out to specific audience groups rather than a generalised marketing effort. 

Get started with StoreHippo

Does the idea of creating a portal for medical services sound interesting? Well, you can further make it more effective and patient-centric with more of StoreHippo features than those listed above;

• Customise your portal’s design by choosing from various ready-made healthcare themes
• Offer customers different modes of payment including pre-paid consultations or COD
• Maintain patient records for future consultations and ease of usage
• Have multi-level logins for admin, partners and patients
• Have custom forms and flows to ease processes within your hyperlocal ecommerce 

Well, all of this can simply be possible instantly and you can have your portal get going in no time. Sounds impossible? Check out StoreHippo features to learn more about our modern-age platform with a 14-day free trial. Drop us a line below to get started!