HealthNMeds

Buying medicine online is unlike buying almost anything else. Many items can only be supplied against a prescription, customers often order for parents or children as well as for themselves, and some would rather photograph a prescription and let the pharmacist make up the order. The same store also carries everyday goods — baby food, cosmetics, sanitary napkins — that people browse and compare as they would in any shop.

A local pharmacy must also be clear about its limits. HealthNMeds states that it does not process requests for Schedule X drugs under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, and its customers need delivery, refund and cancellation terms they can read before ordering.

Meta Mint built HealthNMeds as a complete online store with customer accounts, so a prescription order and a household basket go into the same cart.

• Browse by category, brand or health concern. Shoppers move through nine product categories, featured pharmaceutical brands, or concerns such as diabetes, cardiac and kidney care.
• Search, sorting and filters. Results sort by relevance, rating, price or discount and narrow by category, brand, discount band and customer rating.
• Prescription upload. A Quick Buy option lets the customer upload a prescription and describe what they need.
• OTP login and patient profiles. Customers sign in with a mobile number and one-time password, save delivery addresses and keep separate patient profiles.
• Cart, wishlist and reviews. Products can be saved for later, added to the cart, and rated with a written review.
• Policy pages. Shipping and delivery, refund, cancellation, privacy and terms pages, plus FAQs.

The store is a PHP application with a Bootstrap and jQuery front end and a mobile viewport. Product images are held in cloud storage, the site is served over HTTPS, and pages carry meta and Open Graph tags. It also links to Saha Medical Hall’s app on the App Store and Google Play.