Scommerce and How much it matters in Healthcare

First of all I would like to thank all of you for this overwhelming response..

So lets take our discussion further, Yesterday I was talking to a few people on the possible alliances between scommerce and health as for them all this was new.

Lets first of all have a look at stats:

10% of Retail shopping including health and cosmetic products happens online, out of which the conversion of the best websites is almost 4%.(that too not in first 3 yrs.) I firmly believe in this survey which happened among approximately 2,000 online shoppers, that a majority (53 percent) went directly to retailer and manufacturer sites to research and purchase products, rather than using shopping comparison sites or social and/or community networking sites.

So 100 - 53= 47% left.

Of this 47% around 35% wanted to be physically present in the store while they buy and were certainly not online shoppers.

While social and community sites and content offer some value, they are only driving a small portion of online shoppers (12 percent) to buy more than planned."

So are we fighting for this 12%?

The answer is NO.

Reason 1: Despite their negligible impact on sales, social and community networking sites do play a role in how consumers perceive a company's brand, products and/or services. = A brick model to support this would work wonders.The big opportunity in the social arena is really in branding and advertising and awareness building= after this effort Sales happen through the pull model only.

Reason 2: Believe it or not, Scommerce is SEO as well. Scommerce is also used as a way to build inbound links and generate user content, all of which are tools to improve a website's search results on a given search engine such as Google.

However, social and community networking sites play a pretty minor role in driving online sales, it is equally true that Google still played a relatively major role, especially when compared to shopping comparison sites, social and community networking sites and third-party blogs.
Indeed, Google now drives 15 percent of traffic to retailers' Web sites, compared to just 3 percent for shopping comparison sites.= So the model should revolve around this approach.

Will come up with more.