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infoHealth
In October 2000 Foresite was approached by Scream Communications Ltd (now known as infoHealth Ltd), a group that owns a number of bricks-and-mortar pharmacies, and was asked to develop an on-line pharmacy to service users in the UK and the rest of the world.
The Challenge
Scream Communications required a website that was to sell over 10,000 items from health & beauty products to actual prescription medicines. As well as a complex e-commerce system, the site would also be very information rich and contain a number of applications to help and advise users. These would range from interactive monitoring tools to dynamic travel advice.
One of the areas that made this project different from the development of many other e-commerce stores was the complex rules that surround the sale of pharmacy goods. Of the site's key requirements was to follow these strict rules. For example, users should be allowed to buy no more than three of certain items and the purchase of other items required the user to complete a small questionnaire. It was very important that by adhering to these rules, the site did not deter users from purchasing.
The Solution
The site was developed over the course of 4 months. A project manager was assigned to the development to co-ordinate the design and programming teams. Initially a number of meetings were held with the client in order to develop a detailed specification for the site. The client had an overall idea of what they wanted the system to do but, as with all projects of this nature, a great deal of consultation was required to work out how the overall objectives would be met and to design the actual architecture of the system.
Although a number of off-the-shelf e-commerce packages were evaluated, it was decided, along with the client, that none fitted the complex needs of the site and therefore the decision was made to build the system from scratch. The site is driven by a MySQL database, which stores all of the product, customer and health info data.
Because of the nature of the information held on the site, a great deal of thought was put into the security of the system. The site is secured with a 128-bit Super Certificate as well as an in-built security system using an MD-5 encryption algorithm. The site also needed to have a large back-office system to allow the client to manage many aspects of the system, and because a number of protocols have to be adhered to when selling pharmacy medicines on-line, this was almost as complex as the front-end of the site.
The on-line, secure back-office allows the merchant to search for different types of orders, pharmacists to ok certain orders, despatch orders, view user details, view usage statistics, create invoices as well as many other functions. An off-line system was also created to allow the client to manage the database of over 10,000 products. This then uploads the data to the site and imports it into the on-line database.
The Result
The InfoHealth website has now been live for approximately 3 ½ years and during this time a large number of sales have been made. Users are now able to obtain important health information and advice as well as buying products as diverse as aspirin and wheelchairs.
