Need to set up e-commerce site

[Enlightened1]

Greetings, I have found lots of useful information from this site in the past, but now have a specific question that I could not find an answer to. Forgive me if a similar topic has been discussed, but it is difficult for a web-ignoramus such as myself to filter through all the topics when I don't speak your language and don't understand most of your terminology.

I am a newly trained physician and would like to offer medical advice via an e-commerce web store. Unfortunately, as I am fresh out of training, I do not currently have the means by which to hire a web builder/designer to assist me. I can't even afford cheap right now.

The gist is of my potential website (without getting into too many details) is that a customer, seeking medical advice, would access my site, pay a fee then send me the required documents. I would then analyze the material and send back my report via regular mail/shipping. I do not plan to have this capability initially, but possibly later, I may want to have a repository on my website whereby the customer could login and review their documents and my report(s) online. Initially, I plan to only send them their hardcopy reports.

So, I need a website with a shopping cart for only a handful of possible charges. My research has led me to hosted shopping carts such as shopify or bigcommerce. This seems the easiest way to set up a shopping cart/website without having to worry about the myriad of hosting issues. It seems I could design the website using the templates they offer. The reason I am hesitant, however, is that these seem more aligned for people with numerous products to sell, when I would only have a few charges. Also, I would just like some reassurance from those who are more knowledgable/informed than myself.

Of course I have glorious ambitions for the business, and could foresee this getting pretty big. In such case, would it be better to have my own website? Could I start with a hosted site/cart and then switch at a later point when I have proper funds to hire a good website builder/designer?

Thank you so much for any help or assistance you could offer.

 

[maflynn]

I would look towards a company that specializes in such things instead of you trying to manage it yourself.

 

[Enlightened1]

I would look towards a company that specializes in such things instead of you trying to manage it yourself.

Are you referring to one of the hosted e-commerce sites, like I mentioned above? Can you recommend a company? Thanks

 

[960design]

My thoughts first:
The website will be your storefront. Designing one yourself may save you money today, but will scare away potential customers due to amateur look. Mixing medicine and online is a dangerous game. Also, think about the overall picture. You'd make more money treating patients instead of managing/building a site, especially e-commerce. E-commerce is not to be taken lightly.

If you decide to push through with this look to Stripe to create quick buttons. You can basically pre-program the button with say a $100 fee on a page, $200 on another page, ect. Even this level of easy may be too difficult for you to handle safely.

Good luck.

 

[Consultant]

You probably didn't think through the business model.

If the patients have the "required documents," the person already went to the doctor and can probably afford to have a real doctor to make a second opinion.

If they don't, they have sites such as http://www.webmd.com/

In addition, since you don't have a budget, you don't have a budget to secure the website to handle sensitive information.

 

[mripadmini]

its impossible to start a company that does this kind of service when you have never worked with/for a already established company that does it.

 

[firedept]

Concentrate on being a physician first. Trying to accomplish what you want to do is going to take some knowledge of web development. Security will be a big issue, especially of what you are asking people to do with their files over the net. If you do try to tackle this on your own, I wish you luck in your endeavors.

 

[blaster_boy]

See all the above comments for why you should think twice before doing this. Putting sensitive documents on the web should be done in a way that is very secure. Make sure that you're legally covered !

For startup and light loads, however, Dropbox might be something to look into. You can easely upload docs to a dropbox account and then share the link to the document via an url. You could also give them the wrong link by accident... so I would be very careful about doing this. Or not do this at all.

Your first scenario is just a web-frontend and the exchange of documents and result is done via shipping / mail.

In that case you don't need anything big. You could get away with using Wordpress + WooCommerce plugin + Paypal and/or Stripe extension to sell your services. Should not cost that much.

Technically it's all possible. It's up to you if you want to try it out or not.