An online pharmacy marketplace for a healthcare company

Client

Project goal

Project summary

Solution

When building an online medicine ordering app, our web development team had to resolve the following technical challenges:

1. As catalogs of numerous pharmacy suppliers often were different involving product names (over 60,000 of them in total), data structure, etc., the full unification had to be enabled.
   To provide a unique catalog with unified names of goods, data structure, etc., our developers created a complex algorithm that analyzes the collected product information: names, prices, availability, categories, etc.
   When a new healthcare company connects to the online pharmacy marketplace, the algorithm automatically correlates its goods with those that had already been added to the platform. Using PostgreSQL, our team enabled data storage.
   Thanks to this solution, now the customer is able to easily integrate partners—suppliers of medicines—into the system.
2. It was important to display a range of goods in real-time despite large amounts of content, simultaneous product information updates, and other factors.
   With the view of providing the real-time display of medical product range, our engineers employed Celery, an asynchronous task queue. Using Celery, our team created a scheduling program that regularly updates the data. Then, we enabled caching of geolocation, pharmacies’ activities and information, etc.
3. The system had to instantly provide users with the required information despite different variations of search requests.
   In order to provide app users with the necessary information even if they made a mistake when inputting a search request, our team employed Elasticsearch. With this programming tool, we enabled full-text search across the platform content.
   Using libraries in The Python Package Index (PyPi), our web developers integrated personalized product recommendations based on the analysis of user shopping behavior and geolocation.
4. Suppliers of medical goods needed to collect real-time analytics on the product range, availability, sales, etc., as well as receive statistical reports.
   Aiming to provide companies with real-time analytics data and statistical reports, our software engineers created a complex algorithm that:
   • Collects historical data on the quantity of goods in each pharmacy
   • Collects data on the number of goods sold in each pharmacy
   • Provides reports on different time sections, for instance, per day, week, month, etc.
   • Provides comparison reports for different time periods
   To enable this functionality, our web development team processed the information of hundreds of pharma companies’ APIs and ensured data unification across the entire platform. Additionally, we integrated push notifications that instantly alert organizations on different issues, for example, if some products have already been ended.

The key features

1. Unique catalog of pharmacy goods
2. Full-text search of the desired products and information
3. Online data search using multiple filters
4. Cashback accrual
5. User authorization
6. Personal user accounts
7. Personalized product recommendations
8. Real-time display of goods and prices in the catalog
9. Display of goods and prices on the map
10. The ability for the user to quickly find the required goods using the map
11. Statistics collection on sales, user sessions per day, week, month, etc.
12. Sales and user data analysis in real-time

Result