The Group
Present in Italy for over 40 years, Club Salute is a network of more than 70 affiliated pharmacies, more than 350 professionals and nearly 100,000 loyal customers. A point of reference for pharmacists who find in this innovative project a tool for their development, with a unique platform for the online sale of products and services, with activities to build customer loyalty, data analysis and ad hoc tools to grow their business.
The challenge
With almost a hundred branded products and more than 80,000 active customers, the group already had an e-commerce platform. The new challenge was to design and implement a Local eCommerce platform (farmacia.clubsalute.it), where:
- End users could find (via mobile app or website) the pharmacy closest to their home, order and purchase medicines online (with or without prescription), and communicate directly with the pharmacist via chat;
- Affiliated pharmacies could sell their products and services online, independently manage reservations, orders and shipments, manage customer loyalty activities, and analyze data collected with group consultants to improve their business.
What's more, all of this needed to be done while integrating the different ERPs of the various affiliated pharmacies into a single platform and managing the volume of data in complete security.
The goal achieved
In a first step, Omnys was involved in the management and migration of the e-commerce to AWS infrastructure, which led to an increase in the platform's indexing in search engines and sales.
In a second step, it was involved in the entire Local eCommerce implementation project. In this case, Omnys took care of the design and development of the platform: from the centralized management console (used by the group) to the console for each pharmacist, so that the latter could autonomously manage orders and reservations for the various services offered, as well as direct communication via chat between pharmacist and user.
To make the e-commerce experience easier and more immediate for end users, an app for iOS and Android devices has also been developed.
Downloadable free of charge from the various stores, this application allows you to:
- Find the nearest pharmacy at any time;
- Reserve products and pick them up at the pharmacy of your choice without waiting;
- See what services are available at your pharmacy and book them directly online;
- Contact the pharmacist of your choice directly via WhatsApp;
- Receive notifications directly on your smartphone;
but also preview product offers and promotions, and keep up to date with events and initiatives, all directly on your smartphone.
AWS services used
The cloud infrastructure created for the network is based on the use of Amazon ECS with the ability to enable Auto-Scaling and RDS for the hardware resources needed for the cluster's needs; this approach is designed to optimize reliability, scalability, both vertical and horizontal, and cost.
Rolling Update mode was then used to improve the timing of installing and updating applications and delivery services with automatic deployment.
For the management of sensitive data (such as requested medications and prescriptions), the architecture provides encryption at rest, while for compliance and infrastructure security requirements, one of the services natively provided by AWS has been enabled: WAF (Web Application Firewall).
The AWS infrastructure provided a significant boost to the quality of service delivery and monitoring, as well as sales. In fact, the company needed a cloud infrastructure that could scale quickly and without disruption, both horizontally and vertically, as the number of users and orders increased, while also providing the ability to manage sensitive data with high security standards.
AWS, particularly with its services such as Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Relational Database Service (RDS), has been the best option and the most logical choice from the beginning because it can meet all customer and business needs, both technological and security.
