Making Allergy-Friendly Food More Accessible with the AssureTech Vendor Network
I started AssureTech almost four years ago with the mission of helping the food allergy community. It started with tackling the issue of forgetting the auto-injector, and evolved overtime to include things like traveling safely and finding emergency help after a life-threatening reaction abroad. Covid-19 has forced us and so many other businesses to pivot once more. AssureTech's latest addition to our EpiCenter Platform is our Vendor Network.
It's a well-known struggle that food allergic families pay more for groceries. And with Covid-19 upending the "old normal," we're seeing empty shelves in free-from sections of stores. Naturally, families are looking online to find safe-to-eat foods. But the challenges don't stop there.
Margins in the food industry are typically thin; website costs (including development/management) can be high; and helping customers know where to find you is challenging without a marketing team. All of these added layers of complexity in the free-from supply chain have an impact on food allergic families when operational costs get inadvertently passed onto them.
That's why we've launched the Vendor Network. Staying consistent with our founding mission, we know that one of the best ways we can serve the food allergy community is by making safe-to-eat food more accessible--and this starts with lessening the technical and financial burden on allergy-friendly companies.
Access Best-Practice E-commerce and Marketing Resources at Affordable Rates
The AssureTech Vendor Network is a new section of the site for allergy-friendly companies to list products and services in the Allergy Store and within the EpiCenter App. It starts with a registration process so we can make sure that your products are allergy-friendly and would benefit our users.
Once you're accepted, you and your team have access to everything you need to sell allergy-friendly products online--and a great community who could benefit!
Getting on the Store
Our site and app use WooCommerce and WordPress--which are regarded as one of the best e-commerce combos. Vendors can upload products, set shipping, taxes, and designate which allergen(s) they avoid and/or note any other categories (like fitness or apparel) that they apply to. Your products and/or services (consulting, subscription boxes, and downloadable content all work!) will appear in the EpiCenter App and website. This puts you in front of a great and growing user base that's looking for allergy-friendly support.
We know every business is different, and offer fixed, commission-based, and hybrid pricing to help you find the best fit.
Marketing Support
Adding products to an online store is great, but can seem like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. You're already at an advantage by being part of a growing e-commerce platform and mobile app, but there's still more you can do to drive consistent traffic. This is where the Vendor Network starts to really shine.
We've equipped the Vendor Home with an SEO (search engine optimization) tool that helps you optimize your product for keywords that you choose. You'll also have access to our team (myself included) that brings marketing experience--specifically within the world of food allergy. We'll help you select keywords and make sure your content will have the best chance of appearing in search engine results.
We also run ad campaigns across social media and Google. Typical ad management costs include a markup fee on services--but we don't. Since we're helping you drive traffic to our platform, we manage ad campaigns without added costs. This means 100% of your ad budget is used to drive potential customers while getting managed by experienced professionals.
Migrating to the Vendor Network
If you decide you want to make the EpiCenter Platform your primary storefront, or prefer it to having to manage your own site, we offer website development work within our platform. We'll build a storefront for you--complete with your branding, email signup forms, blog, social media, and/or other content--that you can drive traffic to. We'll manage this property with you and provide recommendations along the way. Websites within our platform start at $15/month--and this includes maintenance and continued "tweaks" you want to make.
Learn More
If you're an allergy-friendly company, you can visit the Vendor Network to learn more, or reach out to info@epicenter-app.com to get more information.
And for anyone reading this with food allergies that isn't a vendor, you can take advantage of the connections we're building by visiting the Allergy Store. You can save even more by starting a 30-day premium app/site membership and save 10% or more on products within the platform.
