Do you have an Amazon Prime account? Do you ever prefer to shop online because it’s so much easier than fighting traffic through a store? eCommerce is here to stay, and we’ve all experienced this in our own daily lives. Your clients are no different.

Offering ease and convenience is important not only for client satisfaction but also for developing better and more consistent health habits for our patients. The good news is that it is very easy for your hospital to offer home delivery, and over 80% of NVA’s GP hospitals have successfully opened their own online pharmacies.

What do you need to know about home delivery? Let’s take you through the basics and how to get started.

How It Works

Home delivery is a way to conveniently ship prescribed diet, preventatives, and pharmaceuticals directly to your clients. Your CSR can place orders for their clients or your client can purchase products from your clinic’s own online pharmacy website. Once the order is placed, goods ship directly to your client’s home from the vendor’s warehouse. All product catalogs are customizable to best fit your clinic’s needs.

Why Home Delivery?

Based on NVA’s own longitudinal study, where we followed ~50K clients for 6 months observing their behavior before and after using our hospitals’ online pharmacies, there are 3 major advantages to using home delivery:

1. It increases refill compliance exponentially for chronic medications and diets because of automatic shipments, which takes the pressure off the client to have to remember every month. The ultimate result is a healthier, happier pet.
2. Home delivery leads to an increase in revenue. Hospitals that utilized home delivery had 2-5% higher growth in preventatives. We found that clients also spent more on services due to seeing a smaller in-clinic bill, averaging a gross margin dollar growth of 22% per patient.
3. Home delivery enables you to compete with Chewy or Walmart. They are drawing clients away from the vet channel, leaving hospitals with lots of prescription approvals to sign but none of the profit. By opening a home delivery service straight from the vet’s office, your hospital can recapture the revenue that’s walking out the door.

How To Get Started

First, pick a vendor. NVA has partnered with Covetrus (Vet’s First Choice) and VetSource as the preferred home delivery platforms.

Each of them will set up a white label online pharmacy website, lead your team through training, provide marketing materials, and handle all the order shipments. We have negotiated substantially discounted prices from VFC and VetSource, with VetSource being slightly more economical.

Know which vendor you’d like to use? Contact Hayley Bright at Covetrus, or Kim London at VetSource.

If you need help choosing a vendor or need more info, contact Victoria Hu at NVA.