Expanding Ecommerce Boundaries to Advance Pediatric Innovation

The Race to an MVP

Children's Mercy Hospital believes that patient care doesn't end at the walls of their hospital. In their quest to transform the health, wellbeing, and potential of children, they're just as willing to look outside to other institutions and innovators for ways to provide the absolute best medical care.
 
CMH came to Guidance with a big idea and a bigger challenge: To help make pediatric products and services more widely known and available. They wanted to create a marketplace where those outside institutions and innovators could promote their unique solutions. Similar to Amazon’s model, those businesses would be able to create their own individual shops within CMH's marketplace and manage their own offerings.
 
At the time CMH proposed this project, the clock was ticking. A pediatric conference, held once every two years, was on the horizon. It was an opportunity they couldn't afford to miss. They needed to debut the new marketplace and get hospitals, providers, and businesses on board and registered. But with an ambitious goal and a limited timeframe, choices needed to be made.
 
As a Shopify Plus Partner Agency, Guidance knew CMH's vision was achievable. Since there was nothing else like it on the market, and because CMH needed ecommerce expertise, Guidance worked extensively with CMH to define the full scope of the project. Through technical discovery, they determined what would be needed to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) in time for the conference. Beyond that, Guidance partnered with CMH to plan a multi-phase approach to further the development of "PedsMrkt," a collaborative marketplace to help accelerate pediatric innovation.

Setting the Boundaries

Children's Mercy Hospital's existing branding appeals to a patient-centered audience, with a clean white presentation and bright primary colors. The new marketplace, on the other hand, would need to appeal to a business-to-business (B2B) audience, professional and trustworthy in the medical space. Guidance worked to strike the balance between the two while maintaining a level of visual design continuity.
 
Because CMH would handle the ongoing maintenance of the overall marketplace, Guidance developed an in-depth style guide for CMH, with directions for appropriate color choices and combinations to use for any new pages they might create. In addition to making sure the colors would be complementary to the hospital's branding, Guidance also made sure the colors were compliant with requirements set forth by the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).
 
For visual assets, Guidance provided CMH with specific parameters for all images to be used across the site, so CMH could easily create new assets and know they would be displayed on the website properly. Guidance also supplied CMH with a curated repository of lifestyle imagery in line with the aesthetic of their brand, to use across the site as needed.

The "Unbreakable" Template

The team at Children's Mercy Hospital would be the ones to maintain the overarching marketplace on a regular basis. To enable the launch of a minimum viable product, they would also be the ones to set up new individual marketplaces for sellers. So, they needed a content management system that would make it as simple as possible to add and arrange new pages and upload new assets and content. In the future, the goal would be to have sellers add their own assets and text to their marketplaces, without involving CMH in the process.
 
Guidance took a modular approach to the website design, so CMH could use those modules as the building blocks of page and template creation. The rules of each module were carefully defined, to allow for maximum flexibility in how various asset types could be handled and displayed. This was also crucial to the success of future development phases, so the site would still look clean and professional when approved vendors started to upload assets on their own. Guidance made sure these templates were “unbreakable” by anticipating all possible variations in assets.

Marketplacer for the Marketplace of Marketplaces

Children's Mercy Hospital branded their overarching marketplace as "PedsMrkt." Businesses, providers, and organizations that register to sell products and services on PedsMrkt would get their own individual "marketplaces." To implement this architecture, Guidance used Marketplacer, an app that helps create the marketplaces and integrates with Shopify Plus for the ecommerce aspect of the solution. Essentially, Shopify Plus serves as the front end, and Marketplacer serves as the back end.
 
Although the vision was to allow sellers to create their own marketplaces within PedsMrkt, for the MVP to meet the pediatric conference launch deadline, the scope required CMH to register the first sellers themselves. From there, sellers were able to publish their own products on PedsMrkt through their own catalog in Marketplacer. All catalogs are synchronized to their highly customized Shopify Plus build, allowing customers to shop on the various marketplaces within PedsMrkt.

Perfecting the Product Page

Another crucial element of the MVP launch was the ability for sellers to add a wide variety of product and service types to their marketplaces. Although Children's Mercy Hospital would have to help with the setup of these items in the early stages of development, their goal was to have sellers be able to handle their own catalogs of products and services themselves.
 
The nature of fulfillment was an additional complicating factor. Some items listed in a marketplace were physical items that needed to be shipped, whereas others were digital products to be downloaded. Sometimes the items could be purchased directly as an ecommerce transaction, but in other cases a buyer might have to be referred to another website to complete a purchase. The ability to direct buyers to Apple's App Store or the Google Play store was also a requirement.
 
Guidance conducted a series of workshops with CMH to determine the requirements, then created a matrix to define all the different product detail page (PDP) types needed for each product type, including variations for pricing (or no pricing), descriptions, and calls to action. Multiple design builds were necessary to accommodate each variation. Guidance also identified what product tags in Marketplacer would be needed to display the proper PDP information and components for the sellers, to facilitate a seamless setup experience.
 
As part of these workshops, Guidance also worked with CMH to help them document the setup process, with easily understandable flow charts and materials to make it as simple as possible for a seller to handle their own marketplace and PDP creation. As a result of these workshops, CMH created a comprehensive operating manual for sellers, eliminating the need for CMH to bear any burdens of individual marketplace upkeep.

Validating the Buyers

While sellers had to complete a registration process to become part of PedsMrkt, buyers had a different journey to take advantage of the individual marketplaces. Children's Mercy Hospital made it clear that not just anyone could be allowed to purchase products and services from the various marketplaces. Purchases had to be restricted to buyers with specific medical reasons to be using these items.
 
In the discovery process, Guidance determined that eligible buyers would have a National Provider Identifier (NPI) Certification Number (CCN). This is a government-issued code that validate the legitimacy of individual providers and healthcare organizations. Guidance worked closely with its Shopify Plus partners to obtain the necessary permissions and utilize those codes to restrict the checkout process to the appropriate users. By using Mechanic, an off-the-shelf middleware app that connects with Shopify, Guidance developers can parse a potential buyer's metadata and validate their profile with a third-party API call.

Using Mechanic also made it easier for CMH to maintain, since it doesn't require the same level of expertise as a custom solution hosted in an Azure or AWS environment would.

Building a Community

Children’s Mercy Hospital, in its ongoing commitment to advancing pediatric healthcare, has introduced the PedsMrkt Community, a dedicated platform aimed at fostering collaboration among pediatric healthcare professionals.
 
The PedsMrkt Community allows members to exchange best practices, collaborate on shared challenges, and work together to enhance patient care and outcomes. This platform was made possible through the seamless integration of Shopify Plus with Circle.so, alongside the implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO) to provide a streamlined login experience across both systems. Access to the community is exclusively available to verified healthcare professionals, identified through an official identification number provided by Shopify during the registration process. By cultivating a connected network of professionals, the PedsMrkt Community strives to drive innovation and excellence in pediatric healthcare.