Building an online pharmacy marketplace with Python
Introduction
Arateg is one of the leading software development companies in Eastern Europe featured by B2B review and rating firms such as Clutch, GoodFirms, AppFutura, WADLINE, etc. With advanced technologies, we help startups and SMEs address their business-specific challenges.
We began using Python since the company’s foundation in 2014. Our software engineers employ this programming language in various projects associated with artificial intelligence, data science, data analytics, information security, and web development.
Python allows us to improve time-to-market as it has high speed and provides nearly 250,000 functionality packages. In this case study, I will describe how our team used Python to build a complex online pharmacy marketplace for a large medical organization.
Resolving technical challenges with Python
A healthcare company aimed to launch a web medicine ordering application that would connect pharmacy chains with users who want to buy drugs at the most reasonable prices. The organization wanted to build rich functionality, including information search, catalog, user accounts, analytics, real-time data visualization, and personalized recommendations.
However, there were over 1,000 of medicine suppliers, each having its own catalogs. These catalogs often used different names of healthcare goods. In total, there were more than 60,000 names. Therefore, it was important to ensure data unification.
In addition, the system had to generate comprehensive reports on the range and availability of drugs, as well as statistics on sales and user shopping behavior.
To address these issues, our software experts provided data visualization and analytics for each of those vendors with the help of the Python advanced language. With the view of ensuring consistency, our team employed Django—a great Python’s framework for rapid development—to create a unique catalog with unified names of goods and information structure.
Another challenge was to display thousands of medicines in real-time despite large amounts of content and simultaneous data updates. For this purpose, our programmers used Celery, an asynchronous task queue, which is also available in Python. Based on distributed message passing, Celery (https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/stable/getting-started/introduction.html) supports scheduling and real-time operations.
With Python’s libraries in the Python Package Index (PyPI), we enabled personalized product recommendations based on the analysis of user buying habits and geolocation.
Project delivery within tight deadlines
Although the system was intended to have rich functionality, our team had to create an online pharmacy marketplace within 5 months. To reduce time-to-market while ensuring high product quality, we decided to employ Python in conjunction with its tools and packages.
Aiming to improve speed, our software engineers used Django, a framework that contributes to rapid development and clean intuitive design. It is worth noting that Dhango’s slogan is “The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”.
Coming up with multiple extras, it allows programmers to perform common tasks much easier. Furthermore, Django provides user authentication, content administration, and other features out of the box.
In order to integrate data from different servers with multiple protocols, we used PyPI that contains packages to address various issues, which also helped us deliver the project faster.
Result
Our web application development company built an online pharmacy marketplace that connects about 1,500 drug suppliers with users. With the platform, healthcare organizations can gather user data, track shopping behavior, as well as analyze real-time statistical reports.
Using Python in conjunction with its frameworks and libraries, our team managed to deliver the project within tight deadlines. What’s more, we were able to address technical challenges such as enabling personalized product recommendations and ensuring data unification.