Why Online Marketplaces Are The Future For The Life Science Industries

It’s 2016 and we are well into the internet age. We live our lives online – from the ways we communicate, to the ways we play, and even – if not especially – the way we shop. These days, there’s an online marketplace for just about everything. When you want to buy a new book, it’s likely that you first visit Amazon, or a similar online book retailer. When you’re looking for new clothes or furniture, you can first check your favorite retailers online to see if they’re stocking anything you’re interested in, before you make the trip to the store. If you’re looking for a unique and reasonably priced gift, you might first visit Etsy or Ebay before prowling around town. Shoot! These days you can even have your groceries ordered online and delivered to your door! So where do scientists and health professionals go to shop for the equipment, samples and professional services they need? The answer should be obvious, but sadly, it’s not – quite. Online marketplaces for the life science industries are still up and coming, and moreover, most are scattered and often not very user-friendly.

Over the past several years, the healthcare industry has undergone some major overhauls in the area of tech advancement – rather, catching up to the way the rest of the world does business. The industry’s move to cloud-based services for patient tracking, data analytics and collaboration shows a move in the right direction. In the last three years, titan companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have all begun to expand into biotech and pharma cloud applications yet, in terms of actual physical transactions and providing an online marketplace for these industries, no real progress has been made, or at least not announced. Industry-wide, sourcing methods tend to remain quite outdated at best, with most business being done the old-fashioned way through endless business travel and in-person meetings, group purchasing orders, and deals with brokers. And of the few online sourcing options for the industries, options are scattered across the internet, often hosted on individual vendor platforms or through auction listings.

Just as the healthcare industry continues to struggle to meet cost-cutting demands, scientists continue to fight for research and manufacturing funding. With shrinking R&D budgets and the seeming shortfall of grant monies, researchers continue to be on the hunt for new ways to save money (and time). And their sourcing options too are quite antiquated.
Luckily, a new company, BioMarketplace, which aims to change the face of industry-wide sourcing launched at this year’s International BIO Convention. It brings scientists and healthcare professionals into the digital age by providing easy and secure access to an ever-growing host of vendors, all in one place. With individual marketplaces such as the signature BIO Blood Market, and markets for lab and professional services already open for business, the tech company aims to open additional marketplaces in the near future.

So, if the healthcare, biotech and pharma industries have already begun cutting costs by aggregating data and interactions into secure cloud service spaces, wouldn’t it also be a viable move for such industries to also save time and money by moving to a more modern way of sourcing the products and services they need? Forward-thinking companies are being called upon to be leaders for the new medical convergence. And they very soon will become inseparable cornerstones for how the entire industry operates.

It’s pretty clear cut that online marketplaces aren’t a dissipating fad. As their viability continues to grow, they will expand into new markets and niches in every industry. Shouldn’t science be at the forefront of this expansion instead of playing a decade-long game of catch-up?