In a growing market, more web merchants are targeting certain healthcare niches as consumers manage more of their healthcare online. They’re also increasingly using the web to research and buy health and wellness products—as well as track their overall health online.

Overall healthcare costs are rising, and the healthcare industry is consolidating. But for Orthoticshop.com, a niche online retailer in healthcare, business is good. In business since 2005, Orthoticshop.com is on track to sell $13 million online this year, up 30% from about $10 million in 2016, says founder Matt Behnke.

To hit those numbers, Orthoticshop.com is redesigning its website and adding more merchandise. “Now is a good time to be in healthcare,” Behnke says. “Consumers are using the web to do a lot more managing of their own healthcare, and that’s good for us because they go online for someone who sells orthotics and they find us.”

The U.S. healthcare system is a $3.2 trillion industry and accounts for about 17.2% of the country’s gross national product of $18.56 trillion in 2016.

Consumers also are spending more out of pocket—and over the counter— on medical, health and wellness products and services in a variety of segments.

The healthcare industry is digitizing rapidly and the customer is getting comfortable with going online for their healthcare needs.

For 2015—the latest year available for full statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—consumer retail spending for durable medical equipment—a category that includes items such as eyeglasses and hearing aids—reached $48.5 billion, up about 4% from the prior year. Consumer spending for other nondurable medical products including over-the-counter medicines, medical instruments, and surgical dressings, also grew 3.7% to $59.0 billion in 2015 and prescription drug spending grew year over year 9% to $324.6 billion, says the federal government.

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Data on how much consumers are spending online specifically on medical, health and wellness products or services is hard to come by but there are some clues. The 60 online health/beauty retailers ranked in Internet Retailer’s 2017 Top 1000, which ranks web merchants on their annual web sales, grew collectively year over year 18.3% to $9.17 billion. In comparison, the U.S. e-commerce market grew 15.6% last year to $395 billion.

In a growing market, more web merchants are targeting certain healthcare niches as consumers manage more of their healthcare online. They’re also increasingly using the web to research and buy health and wellness products—as well as track their overall health online, says Amy Madonia, founder and principal of Madonia Consulting, a New York business-to-consumer e-commerce and digital marketing consulting firm.

“The healthcare industry is digitizing rapidly and the customer is getting comfortable with going online for their healthcare needs by doing research on symptoms or specific doctors, paying bills and buying products and generally getting more educated about their options,” Madonia says. “There is an opportunity for niche web merchants in healthcare to succeed.”

Orthoticshop has spent more than a decade growing into—and learning— its niche. Orthoticshop began selling online with a selection of men’s, women’s and youth orthotics shoes. But over time Behnke has added more orthotic-specific product lines, such as socks and insoles, as well as other specialty merchandise such as gel-filled sleeves to relieve foot pain from bunions.

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This year the number of available SKUs on Orthoticshop will grow nearly 43% to 200,000 from 140,000 as the online retailer adds more specialty brands and suppliers.

The core Orthoticshop customer is age 45 and up and spends, on average, $75 per purchase. Originally customers came to Orthoticshop.com to buy shoes, but over time core customers began asking for additional products, Behnke says.

Key to Orthoticshop’s success has been establishing its site as a provider of orthopedic-related content on such topics as common reasons for heel pain and how it can be treated.

Orthoticshop in February launched a redesigned website that it worked with e-commerce technology vendor X-Cart to develop. The revamped Orthoticshop.com features a responsive design and product reviews, as well as an improved site search. “The redesign gives us bandwidth to add more content and products to keep growing,” Behnke says.

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When Orthoticshop.com launched a dozen years ago customers with aching feet became the retailer’s first repeat customers. Now loyal customers are middle age and older and they want new ways to shop online— including paying for orthotic products using their healthcare savings or flexible savings accounts.

“There’s a lot more healthcare happening online with consumers these days,” Behnke says. “We are the beneficiaries of that.”

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