School Health Corp. serves two markets that are constantly changing. It sells medical supplies to schools whose needs can shift quickly, such as when the H1N1 flu virus emerged this year. And it sells to athletic trainers who may suddenly be very interested in a heat and humidity monitor when a heat wave hits just as school football teams are beginning to practice.
Previously the retailer could not easily make changes to its two e-commerce sites—SchoolHealth.com for school nurses and administrators, and eSportsHealth.com for athletic trainers and directors. But that’s changed since May when the company switched both sites to an e-commerce platform from MarketLive Inc.
“Previously, we had to go to web developers to do a promotion,” says Linda O’Brien, I.T. director and e-commerce project manager. “Everything we wanted to do with the site required a lot of effort. Now we can change the look and feel, set up promotions, do things on the fly, without requiring web developers.” MarketLive provides a single administrative tool for managing both sites, which is useful because there is some overlap between the products offered, O’Brien says.
The MarketLive technology allows for better site navigation, such as enabling school nurses to search by medical condition and trainers to search by brand, O’Brien says. School Health also has taken the wish list functionality MarketLive offers and renamed it a supply list, enabling nurses or trainers to create lists of products they want that they can then send to their purchasing agents. School Health’s own sales representatives also use that feature to create lists of relevant products that they can offer particular clients.
O’Brien says School Health has just scratched the surface of using all the features MarketLive offers. She says she hopes to set up separate sites for purchasing cooperatives to use and dedicated sites for specific conditions or in response to legislation in a particular state that might require, for example, all schools to have defibrillators on hand.
But customer feedback already has been positive. O’Brien says surveys show a lot of athletic trainers directors do not buy online because they find sites that cater to them hard to use. “We had trainers and directors test our sites because we launched and they felt these sites were easy to use,” she says.
Most importantly, the new flexibility and added features are producing more sales: O’Brien says web sales are up 40% since the new sites have been live.
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