Selling vaccines - the incidental flash sale model

Selling vaccines - the incidental flash sale model

Tuesday March 24, 2015,

4 min Read

Have a great product, invite early registrations, limit the supply, sell quickly and enjoy the hype hence generated. This has primarily been the mantra behind the success of Xiaomi. We at Medyog were forced to follow the above model (partly), even though we seriously didn’t want to.

With swine flu creating panic among citizens all over the country, the idea was to provide vaccines to everyone, but the very limited supply of vaccines and the huge demand meant that procuring the vaccines was going to be a very uphill task. We contacted almost every hospital, diagnostic centre, vaccine centre, pharmaceutical company and their distributing agencies, but the vaccines were just not there. After regular follow-ups for almost two weeks, we finally received an in-principle nod from a leading chain of diagnostic centres that vaccines were expected to arrive soon. Finally, around 10 days ago, we launched the portal to accept registrations for the vaccine

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Image credit “Shutterstock

Within a couple of days, we received registrations for over 1,200 vaccines, but there were no vaccines available in the market. Even the vendor who had promised now seemed unsure of procuring the vaccines in time. We did not stop taking registrations, but informed the users of the delay before asking them to register for the next phase (first preference to be given to Phase 1 registrations). At the same time, we accelerated our efforts to procure the vaccines. Bangalore was not the only city with the supply crisis, we contacted distributors in every major city and the response was the same: ‘Not Available.’

Vaccine manufacturers were not prepared for this kind of wide-scale demand, and the limited quantities they manufactured were being highly regulated by the government and directed to worst-affected areas in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh

Some of our partners even suggested that we drop the idea and move on. Sure, our users would have been disappointed, but they would forgive us, as the supply crunch was pretty well known. But we persisted.We were not ready to go back on our first major promise made to the user;not yet!

Having received a tremendous response from the users, we took this data to all the major healthcare players in Bangalore.Finally, on 18th March 2015, we received the final commitment from Apollo Hospitals.Our persistence paid off thanks to the Apollo team who arranged for the vaccine. The numbers were way below our expectations, but, at this point, we were just happy to take whatever they offered us. We were promised only 100 vaccines (a bulk of what they could procure), and in the interest of providing everyone registered under Phase 1 an equal shot at the vaccine, we communicated that Friday (20th March 2015) at 2:00 PM is when we release the vaccines. We placed a maximum cap of two vaccines per registration, and within a few hours of the launch, all the vaccines were sold out.

True, that a lot of our users left empty-handed, and a few wanted more but had to be content with only a couple of vaccines.But, believe me, if we could, we would have definitely provided vaccines to everyone. The fact that we delivered on our promise (partly though) has helped cement our trust with the user.Amarked increase is seen in registrations for the next phase.We’ve already received registrations for over 2,500 vaccines (All this without spending a dime in promotional expenses)

In the journey, we have simplified a cumbersome process (of being vaccinated), created an interface for users to get all the information and book appointments online and made valuable contacts in the industry.But the most satisfying achievement for us is that we wereactually able to deliver the vaccines to the users when almost every large player couldn’t.We now want more; we want to provide the vaccines to all the 2,500+ registrations (with the secondbatch coming soon).Cheers to the team!

Campaign url :http://www.medyog.com/swineflu/

About the author: Pranat Bhadani, Co-founder at Medyog, is an IIT Bombay alumnus. He aims to revolutionize healthcare, bring transparency and convenience and make healthcare more accessible. Reach out at [email protected]