SimpleDose
SimpleDose is a startup company from Brisbane, Australia. The company has modernized the pharmacy industry in the country with a specially developed solution for sorting and dispensing medications. All through WooCommerce.
The concept behind SimpleDose is as simple as it is brilliant. Instead of customers visiting regular pharmacies, standing in lines and being handed all the medications that the doctor has prescribed, they have simplified this process by delivering pre-sorted medications straight to the customer’s door. All through a specially developed subscription solution on the WooCommerce platform.
The company was established in 2021 by community pharmacist Mark Dunston and e-commerce specialist Andrew Hay. From the very beginning the founders knew that they needed a solid platform and a unique pricing model to make this project a success.
– We had to find an e-commerce solution that could handle our concept. A solution which could be adapted to our complex price matrix, says Hay.
Found WooCommerce partner through Automattic
An acquaintance of Hay’s who previously worked at Magento recommended him to get in touch with Automattic to see if they had any suggestions on how and who could resolve this.
Ken Lam, who works as a manager of the WooCommerce success team at Automattic, confirms the story:
– SimpleDose came to us and asked who we could recommend for building an online digital pharmacy, he says.
Automattic worked with SimpleDose in order to understand all requirements and needs, including the need to handle strict laws and regulations, as well as building a complex price matrix and recommendation engine. – We then drew up a list of three strong suppliers that we thought were perfect for the assignment, says Lam.
Chose a Norwegian WooCommerce expert
SimpleDose chose Maksimer from this list to develop their WooCommerce solution.
Maksimer is a company that provides e-commerce solutions on the WooCommerce platform to customers worldwide. They have offices in Norway, Sweden, England and Serbia. They are a verified WooCommerce expert.
– Maksimer’s experience and their knowledge of backend integrations were what made them most interesting. Frontend in WooCommerce is so simple that practically anyone can do it with a little drag & drop. But it was the issues in the backend that were challenging to solve, says the CEO of SimpleDose, Andrew Hay.
The problems Hay was referring to were the possibilities to build support for dynamic pricing in the online store and to expose recommendations based on information entered by customers.
– We cannot add a surcharge on customers’ prescription medications. Therefore, we had to find solutions that allow us to have dynamic prices based on how much they buy, additional products and so on.
– And what Maksimer has developed is really beautifully solved, says Hay.
How the solution works
Nenad Conic was responsible for designing the solution that Maksimer has delivered. He is the Country Manager of Maksimer in Serbia and is very happy to have helped develop the solution for SimpleDose.
– This has been a unique project for us. It is one of the first startup clients we have had, says Conic.
The entire webshoo is designed as a multiple section form, which makes it easy for customers to choose the medications they need and find relevant and recommended additional products.
SimpleDose now has all the information they need to be able to issue a subscription to the customer. The customer can change, remove and add products to their subscription at any time from a separate page.
The solution is custom built on top of WooCommerce. The unique thing here is that the form populates the shopping cart based on the suggestions and information the customer enters. There is a complex price matrix in WooCommerce store with over 3500 products that are taken into account based on who the customer is and the amount of goods the customer needs.
Make use of the possibilities of Woocommerce
– The whole story here is that we have developed everything especially for SimpleDose, says Nenad Conic.
The form is built with a robust form builder, Gravity Forms, which is a trusted plugin to WooCommerce – and WordPress.
– The reason we chose Gravity Forms is that it is easier to adapt the form when new needs arise than to build a form from scratch, says Conic.
-If we need new fields or boxes, it is quite easy to adapt.
The difference between a traditional webshop and SimpleDose’s solution is that here you don’t shop for products based on images and information as in other webshops.
– In this case the customer knows what they want and they fill in a form that has the ability to suggest additional products along the way, based on the information the customer enters, says Conic.
Andrew Hay at SimpleDose is very pleased with both the technology and the solution: