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Retail health care has been in the news a lot in the last six months. CVS has been striving to expand its products since November when it proposed spending $69 billion (paywall) to acquire Aetna. Walgreens was briefly in talks with AmerisourceBergen in February about acquiring the drug wholesaler. And Rite Aid, which had previously sold 1,932 stores to Walgreens, is now selling the remainder to Albertsons. In many ways, these mergers are a reaction to broader retail developments. By the end of 2017, approximately 7,000 brick-and-mortar stores were slated to close, up 224 per cent from 2016, across all categories, surpassing the previous high of 2008, when the Great Recession began, for the most closures in a single year.
The Rise of Online Retail Shopping
Consolidation makes sense in light of these data, but it is far from sufficient. Storefronts are closing not because consumers are buying less, but because they are buying differently. Consider the following example: In 2017, online retail sales increased by 16 per cent, and this trend is expected to continue in 2018. This means that in order to truly engage with the current consumer, a store must invest heavily in digital. However, because health care is such a high-risk, high-trust industry, replacing caregivers with technology will be difficult. The customer or user experience is critical to the success of an eCommerce website. Customers anticipate an experience that is comparable to, if not identical to, that of a single trader. The flow of the website, segmentation, and retail personalization of the product depending on the shopper’s preferences are all crucial. Solution: Improving the user experience can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The most important part is to build a simple and easy-to-use website that users can easily navigate. However, things may be changing. I’ve seen distinct swells of advancements across all of the e-business since online shopping first surfaced in the mid-to-late 1990s, and I believe that collectively, these have opened the front door for medical insurance to enter in an entirely new shape, one that blends living beings and future technologies in a new and better way.
The Second Retail Commerce Wave
As a result, the new wave of retail trade, as I like to call it, began to emerge. This entailed exploiting the internet’s power to break up supply chains while focusing on direct contacts with customers. New companies such as Eyeglasses Ford and Casper began selling things on their own brands and crafting emotionally evocative stories around them, rather than giving an online inventory of different existing brands. Offering customers a sense of belonging (paywall) became a vital aspect of a retailer’s online success, and this raised people’s expectations of what they expected from businesses.
Health care enterprises had been mostly absent from the internet retail narrative until now. This could be explained in part by the fact that patients were frequently regarded as recipients of treatment rather than consumers. However, the Affordable Care Act and the development of high-deductible plans have raised patient awareness as a discerning customer in recent years. Despite this, the retail trend of reducing human interaction has created a dilemma.
Digital Commerce’s Third Wave
Fortunately, the rise of online retail provided that chance. Since the Parker Parkers and Caspers of the world had shown how branding might make computers more human, the two aspects appeared to be far more friendly than they had been previously. It became conceivable to envision how to adapt technologies to human existence rather than the other way round, and the third rise of technological commerce began to take shape. We’ve adapted the third wave approach to pharmaceuticals at the company I created in 2015. Instead of aiming to develop technology to replace pharmacists, we built a technological platform that allows them to transform into super-pharmacists, able to quickly use data to provide customers with the best advice based on their habits and histories. It’s a way to keep the best of the conventional experiThe service for automatic investing Betterment is a prime illustration of this situation in banking, which is another industry that has been slow to catch up to the digital retail revolution. Financial transactions require a high level of trust since they involve products that require a lot of explanation. Betterment, on the other hand, empowers professionals through technology, providing customers with enough context with their data to make them secure enough to complete the recommended transactions. Hence while incorporating the finest of digital into the mix. The same concepts can be used to connect stakeholders across the healthcare system. We routinely share real-time information amongst patients’ doctors and their insurance firms at my company to assist them in making better decisions.
We can drastically alter the economics of industries if we start combining humans and tech in this way. I believe that in health care alone, we can compute the optimal quantity of treatment a person requires and that we can assist in the establishment of fair drug prices based on the health benefits they provide.
FAQ’s
What is the difference between e-commerce with mobile technology?
M-commerce (mobile e-commerce) refers to online sales transactions conducted using wireless electronic devices including hand-held computers, mobile phones, or laptops. These wireless gadgets communicate with computing networks that allow customers to make online transactions.
What exactly is e-commerce, and what are the various sorts of e-commerce?
Electronic commerce meaning internet commerce are other terms for e-commerce. E-commerce also includes the exchange of money, funds, and data. Commercial to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C), Customer to Customer (C2C), and Customer to Business (C2B) are the four types of business interactions (C2B).
What are the differences between electronic commerce's first and second waves?
The first wave involved linking businesses to a network so that electronic transactions could be sent to them. The Internet-enabled the second wave, which allowed consumers to access these electronic networks and conduct transactions (aka e-commerce).
