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Most of the people find it difficult to maintain medical records and doesn’t find them when its needed the most , Healthizen is here to solve this problem This portal allows user  to upload their medical details – from their weight and height, doctor prescriptions, lab tests results, details of surgeries undergone, X-Ray, MRI scan, ECG and other reports.

Details on the portal are accessible anytime, anywhere and user need not carry their files and records of medical history every time they  visit a doctor.

Healthizen is a pune based startup founded by Anand Anupam, an IIT-IIM graduate. Healthizen mission is to have centralized information platform and reduce the information asymmetry in the health care space and develop the system by placing patients at the center of the ecosystem.

Ina addition to providing a ready-to-use platform for online storage, this portal has also a panel having doctors and health experts, who help the users with general health tips as well as second opinion whenever required.

Healthizen has a big shopping section where a user can find health related products like health food, specialized health accessories, portable testing equipments etc.

Lets have a look at the monthly traction at Healthizen:

Its a decent statistics to begin with, check out Healthizen and share your views.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

- Allow users to discover the products in the store easily,  Products that are on SALE has to highlighted, there may be products that should be brought under the users attention because of other reasons e.g.  very popular.

- Most people like to browse through the store for seeing what they have and whether something attracts their attention. Browsing is made easier when products are categorized in ways that customers expect them to be. Use structured navigation such as a Double Tab Navigation with Breadcrumbs.

- Often people aren’t clear which product they want to buy. They may have several options that they want to compare before buying. So, enable a Product Comparison tool which  can address this need of a online user.

- User wants to see the product, try to assess the look and feel of the product though online products can’t be felt but effort should be made to get closer to it. User should very well know how it looks from all sides. Implement Gallery and capture all views and important aspects of product.

-  Many shops have shop assistants that help customers to find the right product for them. Online this is difficult to do so best thing to do is encourage users to recommend, rate, comments on product they have bought. Collect these recommendations and implement them smartly. Users tend to buy products on other users recommendations.

- Needless to say Shopping cart is one of the most critical element of an online shopping site. Shopping cart allow users to choose the products and give them the flexibility of buying products. Choosing an item and buying an item is altogether different use case.

- Many times when people shop they do not find anything for themselves but they find something that might interest a friend or relative. In that case they want to recommend it to others or letting others know about the existence of the product. Provide  them “Send a link” feature.

The essentials of shopping should be taken into account for online shopping as well since they have little to do with the medium itself.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Don’t force Guest to signup before Checking out:

Its a big turn off for me when i need to signup for the service to buy a product, i generally prefer to transact as guest, when the experience is good and satisfying i signup on that online store on my next transaction. Basically as an e-commerce store you need to have a very good reasons why forcing guests to register to purchase products. Try to simulate the offline shopping experience. Do you have to open an account when you buy stuff from a new retail store? Don’t make that mistake online. Allow guests to check out.

But you also need to sell reasons why guests should register. It’s all about making it easy, now and in future.

Slick and Fast -

Facilitate user to checkout easily, the process should be as fast and slick as possible. Remove any Ads which may distract users, never ever try to up sell or cross sell in this page. You can do that in product page or when the product is added to the cart. Here the objective should be to collect the payment, If out of greed you tend to entice the users to choose other stuff there is a high risk of them abandoning the cart.

Collect user feedback once payment in through -

Once a visitor has converted, rather than show the standard confirmation page, why not also ask for some feedback on their experience? User can use tools like Surveymonkey to create feedback form and collect their responses. You can add some of the questions like -

• Were you able to find products you were looking for easily?
• What you liked or disliked the most about our website?
• Please tell us how we can improve your next visit?

This qualitative feedback is priceless to e-commerce portals. Not everyone will put their views but believe me you will collect feedbacks from the smart users and don’t forget to inform them once you make the suggested changes.

Handle Errors Gracefully

Problems occur during the check-out stage. Cards are declined, people enter invalid email addresses and they forget to specify their preferred delivery method. To cover all eventualities, you should display messages that are:

• Contextual
  Put the message next to where the error occurred.
• Useful
  No “Error code 21″ messages please. Write friendly, useful error messages, such as, “Sorry, we believe your email address is invalid. Did you accidentally add an extra full stop or space?”
• Conventional
  Error messages should be red. People understand that red indicates a problem.

If you intend to make a e-commerce application make sure you adopt a simple checkout process, or you already run an e-commerce app pay attention to checkout process, assess and analyze the drop and dig into the root cause of it. Just when you are about to close a sale Unfriendly shopping carts kill your site’s ability to convert sales.

Studies have shown that the average online business website loses about 75 percent of its shoppers during the shopping cart stage of transaction, which is a huge loss in terms of business. Why they drop off and how this trend can be reversed by following simple steps -

1) State total price clearly – Be honest upfront and provide total price at the first step rather than inflating the price at the final step of checkout by adding Tax, VAT, shipping charges etc. Inflated price is real shocker for users and they feel cheated and they had assumed the price displayed before checking out is the final price. Afterall honesty is the best policy . Recently i dropped out from checkout process at Bigshoebazaar since shipping charges was introduced at the last stage and it inflated the price.

2) Simple Checkout process - Emphasis and hence design of shopping cart should be such that it should be easy for users to buy. Try to make your check out method a short, one page affair. Having them fill up too many pages with useless information will only drive them away.

3) Include Progress Indicators - Customers need to know where they are in the shopping process. This holds truer for e-commerce sites. Label the steps clearly to let the customers know where they are in the check out process. Some of them, especially those new to online shopping, want to check and double check their actions. Make it easy for them to navigate back and forth through the pages. It gives confidence while buying and merchant credibility is built.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com