New store for a digital pharmacy Fracción

Introduction

Fracción, a digital pharmacy created in 2018 with the aim of improving access to low-cost medicines for the Chilean population. The particular characteristic of this pharmacy is the fractional sale of medicines, its customers can buy the exact dose of pills or blisters indicated by the medical prescription, thus avoiding unnecessary spending on complete boxes.

Challenge

Fracción's first virtual store was built on Shopify, but for its expansion, the digital pharmacy was required to connect with multiple systems. For this, they chose nopCommerce due to its versatile architecture and its Microsoft-based technology,

When Fracción hired a nopCommerce partner Tecnofin to implement nopCommerce, they faced many challenges, including:

• For the sale of controlled drugs, the corresponding printed or electronic prescriptions had to be uploaded and validated.
• It required to validate which drugs and in what proportions are reimbursed by health insurance
• Apply to orders subsidies from government discount programs
• Clients should be able to subscribe to recurring medications for chronic diseases.
• Full connection with the Odoo ERP
• Allow different unique Chilean payment methods.

Solution

After the migration of the medicine eCommerce website to nopCommerce, Tecnofin managed to successfully meet the needs that Fracción's business model required integrating plugins with the following characteristics:

• A plugin to verify which medications require a prescription to comply with health regulations
• Connections with two insurance companies (more in the future) to send the information of the patient, order and prescription and retrieve the information of the percentage of each product that the company will be reimbursed and to certify the purchase to register in the company the application of the reimbursement.

  ✓ In addition, the plugin allows the customer to upload prescriptions in printed or digital format and associate them with products in the shopping cart. The insurer's reimbursement is reflected in the order total.

• A plugin to settle the order through surpluses in Cruz Blanca
• A plugin that validates credit card bins in order to assign a discount
• A plugin that assigns discounts according to the Province and Commune of the shipment
• A plugin that assigns discounts from a repository of RUTs (Chile's Single Taxpayer Identification Number) assigned to certain cities.
• A plugin to allow chronic patients to subscribe to recurring medications.
• A plugin for the complete interconnection with their Odoo ERP through an API that includes: products (including categories, manufacturing laboratories, specifications, variants, stock, prices, etc.), customers, orders, medical prescriptions. (both image and digital formats) and discounts, insurance coverage, discounts, etc.
• Login to the store through the RUT and its corresponding
• A different plugin for each payment method: Caja de Los Andes, Fpay (QR Code), Caja Vecina (convenience stores), Cruz Blanca (personal credit line), Klap (credit cards), etc.

Result

In 2020, even with the pandemic, Fracción was a success: sales increased 10 times and orders 8 times, reaching 15,000 a year. Thousands of fractionated and unfractionated medicines were delivered throughout the territory of Chile, increasing its customer base to 10,000. By 2021, sales grew even more, growing 289% compared to 2020.

Choosing nopCommerce as an eCommerce platform and Tecnofín as a developer were key factors to the success of the project since nopCommerce’s flexible architecture allowed to fully meet Fracción's special needs and to drive and support fast growth.