Online retailer Betty Mills can spot a good business opportunity when it sees one, which is why seven years ago it began testing the healthcare equipment market to see if consumers and small businesses would buy medical supplies such as bandages, canes and walkers online.
Once it began selling those products online, sales followed. Today, healthcare equipment and supplies is Betty Mills’ biggest and fastest-growing segment. While total web sales for Betty Mills grew about 13% to $14.8 million in 2017, healthcare product sales grew nearly five times faster, reaching $8.6 million. “Our future is squarely focused on healthcare,” says Betty Mills CEO Victor Hanna. “It will be 75% of our business this year.”
As consumers spend more out-of-pocket on healthcare and take on greater responsibility for managing their own care, they’re finding themselves buying more medical equipment and supplies, and many are going online to do so. And that increase in consumer spending is opening up new e-commerce opportunities for web merchants willing to take on the complexity of selling healthcare products online, say e-commerce analysts.
“Healthcare is an e-commerce market with a lot of growth potential,” says Kate McCarthy, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst. And it’s already a sizable market; consumers spent an estimated $12.0 billion on online healthcare equipment and supplies in 2017. Those numbers are based on an analysis of more than 200 healthcare equipment and supplies merchants by Internet Health Management, a sister publication of Internet Retailer. Either web retailers disclosed their web sales or retailer estimates were formed by Internet Health Management based on metrics that included monthly visits, average ticket and conversion rate.
Betty Mills is typical of the web merchants that target healthcare equipment and supplies as a new source of online shoppers and sales. It now carries more than 50,000 SKUs in more than a dozen product categories that range from briefs and under pads for incontinence to test kits and specimen collection jars for laboratories and medical offices. Betty Mills expects that vast array of products will help grow its healthcare product sales another 17.6% this year to more than $10 million. That same growth scenario is playing out for scores of other online retailers, including Amazon.com Inc., which is selling medical equipment ranging from beds, wheelchairs and blood pressure cuffs to healthcare supplies such as bandages, wraps, heating pads, and other specialty and over-the-counter products.
Look across the broad spectrum of retailers selling healthcare-related products and you’ll find a wide array of retailers. There are giants such as Amazon, Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. and big drug store chains such as CVS Health and Walgreen Co. There also are a number of smaller niche merchants, including Medex Supply, Blowout Medical LLC, Overstockdrugstore.com, and others that sell medical equipment, and online retailers such as Perkins Medical Supply, Volusia Medical Supply and Reliable Medical Supply Inc. that sell healthcare supplies.
Consumers are shopping online more for healthcare products because they are paying more out-of-pocket for all forms of healthcare including for products, services and treatments outside of hospitals and doctor offices. Last year, the average consumer spent about $9,596 on all forms of healthcare, up 24.6% from $7,700 in 2007, says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“We are an aging population spending more on canes, walkers, glasses, supplements and a wide variety of other products as we each personally manage more of our own health and wellness or become care givers at home for our families,” says Gene Alvarez, Gartner Inc. vice president and e-commerce analyst. “A lot more of that buying will happen online.”
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