Now order your medicines online with EasyMedico, a platform helping a regular offline medicine buyer go online.
Ordering medicines online aren't as simple as ordering mobile phones. Though there is an independent online vertical for companies like BigBasket in vegetables & groceries and for Urban Ladder in furniture and many others. A few years back no such online vertical existed in particular for drugs and wellness.
This market gap intrigued Alok Bachhawat. He planned to create a complete ecosystem where he could help a regular offline medicine buyer go online and start ordering medicines. Thus he ideated the concept in late 2013 and EasyMedico was operational by early 2014.
Vinay Chhajlani, a media and technology veteran, is the co-founder. He has successfully founded firms like Webdunia and Diaspark Inc. He has served on the board of Network18 as a non-executive director. He is the chief strategist behind EasyMedico and was instrumental in making it a technology-centric business.
Alok’s work experience includes managing his family’s portfolio of companies in multiple domains like real estate and rental management. He has also set up business centres in select cities.
They follow a cross-customer channel model to be in constant touch with their customer and also to have complete control over what they could sell and what they should sell.
What does EasyMedico do?
They are a click-and-mortar pharmacy and wellness store. They sell medicines and other healthcare products. For this, they follow a cross-channel retail model to reach customers via the web, app, and stores. They are providing conveyance with respect to delivery in over 50,000 pin codes.
USP of the product
Alok says, "Our USP lies in the fact that we are trying to digitise the experience of ‘mohalle ke pharmacy’ into a ‘mobile pe pharmacy’. We recently ran a campaign that encourages our users to simply upload their prescriptions and then let our customer excellence team take care of their orders. The in-house pharmacy team helps them with solving any of their queries about medicines or the ordering process. We called this campaign ‘SEARCH mat karo, sirf UPLOAD karo’, eliminating the medicine search and discovery process for the buyer."
Revenue growth and projection
They have grown by over 200 percent in sales across all their touch points for FY’16. Their projections for the current year are pegged for a 2x or a 100 percent growth again.
Market size
Online sales of healthcare products are growing rapidly and the annual online sales estimate in this vertical is $100 million. For physical retail, McKinsey India reports that the Indian pharmacy retail market will be $55 billion by 2020.
Monetisation strategy
Regarding this, Vinay says, "EasyMedico has an inventory-led model and we directly fulfil our customer orders. We sell and deliver directly to our customers."
Team size and their hiring strategy
Their current team size is 75 with around 50 people in their retail operations and 25 for e-commerce operations and technology. They hire through channels viz. placement agencies, naukri.com, referrals but mostly it is via referrals.
According to Alok, "E-commerce being a relatively new domain always attracts young people. We hire and train people and give them challenging and engaging tasks which keep them motivated to do more."