Cases - Internet and Businesses Online

E-commerce is gaining pace! Research firm eMarketer predicts that 2003 will see online sales reaching US $58.2 billion excluding travel. According to Forrester Research, another reputable research company, business to consumer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion by the year 2008. While offline retail sales are staggering and will conti

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

nue to do so in near term, online retail sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive year over year growth! And by the same year, two third of all US households will buy some kind of products and services online. In 2003 alone 97 million consumers will make some kind of purchases through the Internet.

If you are selling products an

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

d services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk loosing significant portion of your business to your more proactive competitors!

Is it difficult to start selling products or services online?

May be, in the beginning of Internet era, this was a daunting task, but today, with proper pla

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

ning it is fairly easy.

- Choose the products or services that are viable to sell over the Internet

- Build an online presence

- Create an online product catalog

- Choose payment methods

- Promote

Select products or services to sell

Although, some products are easier to sell online, contrary to popular believe, most of the products an

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

d services are, actually, marketable on the Internet. At present, books, electronics, information and travel related products are selling better online. But, that does not mean that there is no room for other products or services. As a matter of fact, you can sell just about anything over the Internet! It depends more on the market s

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

egment you choose, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery store were not doing very well on the Internet. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Research many of today’s slow categories are poised to significant growth as oppose to early onli

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

e sales leaders like travel and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth. Prediction is:

Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent, reaching $18.2 billion by 2007. The home products category will grow by 42 percent over five years, from $7.3 billion in 2002 to $42.0 billion in 2007. Flo

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

wers, cards, and gifts will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $5.3 billion in 2007.

That’s not all! By the year 2008, today’s best selling product: books will have a mere 3 percent share of total business to consumer online sales.

So, if your products and services can generate offline sales there should not be any pro

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

blem in selling these items online.

Build online presence

You can choose to build an e-commerce website either yourself by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing company to do the job for you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to spend a significant amount of money. E-commerce

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

ite is a very broad terminology! Depending on you demand, it can cost you from a modest US $800 to any where over a million US dollar! That’s not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerable time on it, as well. Writing the technical scope, choosing the appropriate design for your site and creating proper content for your site

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

will take a lot of your time. And there is no guarantee that you will do everything right!

That’s why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want to spend a fortune in your first endeavor, you should think about making your online presence by choosing one of the available, on the Internet, Web Store services. There are enormous a

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

dvantages of using these services:

- You can build one for a fraction of the cost, needed to create an e-commerce website.

- You can choose the design of your web store from numerous available templates.

- Simple editor allows you creating your web store all by yourself.

- You can be up and running within days.

- You can choose a merchant

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

account from the one offered by the service provider.

There are many Web Store service providers on the Internet like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, etc. Compare and choose the one, which best suits your requirement. As an added advantage, some of the Web Store service providers will integrate your store with a shopping mall or e-mark

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

etplace free of charge. This will instantly expose your web store to a large targeted prospective customer audience. Create an online catalog

If you sell only one or couple of products and do not add products or services often, you don’t require an online catalog. However, if you have a product line of over 10 products and you cons

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

tantly add or change products, you should consider a web store with the facility of an online product catalog. This feature of a web store service allows rapid developing and maintaining of you electronic catalog without spending large sums on creating one by yourself.

Look for a web store service provider who offers wizard or form

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

ase product adding method to the electronic catalog and use some kind of standard product classification codes. At later stage, if you choose to sell products through e-marketplaces, this will allow you to integrate your products to e-marketplaces and make sales offers with ease.

Choose a payment method

If you are planning to sell eb

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

ooks, reports, whitepapers etc. I would suggest you to consider using clickbank’s marketplace. That way, you don’t have to worry about getting a credit card merchant account.

Around 90 percent of all sales transaction occur online are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment over the Internet, you must first have a mer

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

chant account. A merchant account allows a vendor to process credit card transactions. If you built a web store online with one of the web store service providers, you will see that they offer gateways to one or several merchant account providers and have partnership with them. In general, you get a better deal with them. However,

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

s charges vary significantly from one merchant account provider to another, make sure you shop around before committing yourself to one.

Promote you site

To sell your products through your site, you must draw traffic. There are number of ways of promoting your site on the Internet. This includes:

- Search engine submissions

- Addin

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

g your site to different online directories

- Opt-in email campaign

- Link exchange

- Banner and link ads

In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and online promotional methods you can come up with. The more traffic you can generate the better chance you have of selling more products from your Web Store

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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The first real advergame was a customized videogame incorporating brand messages and was distributed on floppy disk by American Home Foods to promote the Chef Boyardee brand during the 80’s. Advergames are used to promote products or services, organizations, and even opinions and viewpoints.

No matter how many visitors you are able to attract to your website, there are still ways to lose them before making a sale. Below are the top 10 ways to lose a paying customer.

Focusing on events may miss teh system in action leading to worse problems later...

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