The new nopCommerce website for the US major medical supplier

Acu-Market is one of the largest suppliers of acupuncture, herbal, homeopathic, & supplements in the United States. A family-owned business established in 2000 facilitates practitioners and students with the convenience of buying all supplies from a single source.

Challenge

Acu-Market did not have a health eCommerce website with content management system. Previously they had an online shopping site developed on AspDotNetStoreFront with a lot of customization. The client was unable to upgrade the version of AspDotNetStoreFront due to the custom code. Acu-Market was looking for a .NET shopping cart which has good support and the latest technology stack.

Based on the requirements, Citytech as a nopCommerce solution partner suggested the client migrating to nopCommerce as both nopCommerce and AspDotNetStoreFront are SQL server-based and data migration between the two platforms will be easy. nopCommerce leverages the latest technology to build the website, modular architecture, super strong community support.

The main challenges of this project were: to integrate the website with MOM ERP, to migrate all the data - around 40,000 customers and 10,000 products, - from the old site to a new one, to implement new shipping methods, and to develop custom doctor’s module using nopCommerce architecture.

Solution

Citytech was closely working with the MOM support team to ensure the seamless integration of the system with the store. The development team has done a real-time integration wherein Products, Price, Inventory, Shipping information have been transferred from the MOM system to the online store. Similarly, Order data, payment information have been transferred from the website to the MOM system. The migration to nopCommerce and the additional work took approximately 10 weeks to finish.

To further increase the functionality of the Acu-market website, a few plugins were developed to cater to client’s requirements.

Custom Development for MOM ERP sync.

Free shipping discount rule plugin

This plugin was developed to create a custom discount rule. The client wanted to associate product categories with shipping methods and calculate the discount based on the minimal value amount.

The promotion is applied automatically if a customer has chosen products under certain categories (store owner can set up these categories via the admin area) and the sum value of these products is equal or greater than the minimum amount (which is also specified in the admin area). In this case, during the checkout, the user doesn’t have to pay the shipping charge for particular shipping methods.

Here is how this plugin looks on the customer’s end. Below is the screenshot of a customer’s cart.

Let’s imagine that customer wants to purchase hand sanitizer and lip balm. The second product belongs to one of the categories that are set up by store owner in the admin area. As the customer has not purchased worth of $100 of that product so the customer has to pay shipping charge for “Saver Shipping (3-6 business days)”.

Now let’s see how the discount requirement rule works. The customer increases the quantity in cart for second item to meet this rule.

Offered shipping methods section will look like on the screenshot below:

One-Page Checkout plugin

Another requirement was to customize the checkout flow of the default nopCommerce.

Earlier on the checkout page, the entire data grid view was in on click accordion view model. Now to reduce clicks by end-user we have developed this plugin to show all possible data sets with minimum clicks. This is how it looks on the customer’s checkout page.

Custom Doctor Module

Another important aspect of Acu-market is that it does not sell medical supplies directly to patients but through doctors. In order to make the process effortless, it was important to develop a smooth easy-to-use interface that the doctors could use. Citytech developed the “Doctor module” in the Acu-market website for the doctors to log in and create the necessary prescriptions.

Let’s see how the module works for doctors. There is a Select patient field on the screenshot below where the doctor can select the patient to whom acu-script (prescription) will be sent.

Select Patient field in Doctor module

Then the doctor goes to Create prescription screen: here he can add product and dosage insrcuction for the patient.

Create Prescription screen

The portal requires from certified doctors to register using their license numbers which then goes through an internal verification process to get rid of impostors. After successful verification, doctors can proceed to develop the detailed prescription in the name of the patient (add the email address of the patient), by adding the necessary medicines from the store, provide the intake information, and can also add a quick message to the patient.

After generating the prescription, doctors can also preview it before sending it to the patients. The email with prescription will be sent to the patients who can now purchase the medicines directly from Acu-market as directed by the doctors using a link sent in the email.

Through the dashboard, users can also view the prescriptions sent, medicines purchased, etc. In its turn, marketers can use this information to organize targeted marketing campaigns to recover abandoned carts and increase sales.

The preview of Acu-script email with prescription that will be sent to the patient

Doctor can track each sent acu-script email and its profit

Earlier Acu-market was facing some performance issues with the site which were fixed during the work. Citytech team deployed the nopCommerce website on Azure which helps a lot to improve the speed.

Citytech continues to provide post-development support to Acu-market.

Result

The website was successfully launched in the mid of July. After changing the platform the site is getting approximately 90 orders per day which is 30% more than before migration. The number of new customers increased by 20% in comparison with the previous platform.