One of Europe’s largest online pharmacies, DocMorris connects millions of customers, doctors, pharmacies and insurers — all on a single platform.

The company has its roots in ZurRose, a Swiss brick-and-mortar pharmacy founded in 1993 to deliver medications to doctors. The company has grown impressively over the decades, acquiring several pharmaceutical and software companies, including DocMorris, one of Europe’s largest online pharmacies, in 2012, and Germany’s third-largest pharmacy, medpex, in 2019.

Today, DocMorris boasts 1,600 employees operating in four European nations, providing millions of customers with comprehensive digital health services, in pursuit of its vision of creating a digital health ecosystem for everyone to manage their health in one click.

The challenge

Inflexible legacy search solution hurts performance, scale and UX

To achieve its business goals, the company sought to boost its online brand. Unfortunately, its legacy search system — having reached end-of-life — lacked an upgrade path to meet the company’s evolving needs.

The existing search engine wasn’t meeting the company’s current functional requirements, leading to user frustration from both customers and internal team members. Its inability to handle increasing traffic led to bottlenecks, and its lack of an intuitive UX made it hard for users to find what they were looking for. 

“The search engine we had was basically end-of-life. It didn’t meet our requirements on the product or business side,” says Nina Kalz, Product Owner for Product Discoverability at DocMorris. “It was not performing at all. We had just a few people who knew what to do in the backend, and for everyone else, one wrong click could break everything. 

“Even our customers struggled to get along with search,” she adds. “We needed a better, more effective search experience to guide customers to the products they were looking for and to meet business expectations.”

On the backend, limited flexibility restricted the team’s ability to customize and control the search experience, and a lack of analytics prevented it from understanding user behavior, preventing optimization. Kalz also recognized the need for AI capabilities to automate search functions to deliver faster, smarter experiences.

The solution

Algolia is just what the doctor ordered for improved search experiences

The company thoroughly investigated search providers, ultimately deciding to move ahead with Algolia, which met its extensive requirements, including out-of-the-box performance, comprehensive functionality and an easy-to-use backend UX.

“We saw pretty poor performance and search efficiency in certain areas with our previous search engine,” says Dominik Tümmers, Head of Product Management at DocMorris. “That was one of the main criteria when we evaluated the market for a new search. Algolia stood out with out-of-the-box performance that was much better than competitors.”

Algolia made a positive impression on the company, having a roadmap and AI capabilities that would help future-proof its search function for years to come. DocMorris could deploy the solution with confidence, knowing Algolia had Gartner Group’s stamp of approval as a leader in execution and completeness of vision.

“AI proved helpful in search, especially with Dynamic Re-Ranking,” Kalz says. “We can react to seasonality and really learn what our users need and want. Before, it was more of a guessing game.”

The company deployed Algolia’s Search API, along with key features such as Dynamic Re-ranking, A/B Testing and Rules on its DocMorris site over five months — then quickly on its Medpex sister site digital apps. Kalz says the implementation was easy thanks to Algolia’s strong documentation, support and collaboration.

“Right from the start, we felt taken by the hand and led to the solution to our challenges,” she says. “It was always a very good collaboration. During implementation, the kickoff and one-on-one support for our tech teams, Algolia’s documentation and the clear plan gave us a lot of confidence.”

Dynamic Re-ranking (DRR) was a critical feature for DocMorris , helping the company surface its most popular items at the top of search results. After adding a rule to highlight DocMorris’ self-branded products, DRR elevated those items even further. 

“Dynamic Re-Ranking showed us that customer needs are often different from what we anticipate,” Tümmers notes. “Strong internal stakeholders push certain products to the front, but with Algolia, the customers actually re-ranked products based on their needs, not what our category team thought.”

The result

A prescription for brand strength and greater conversions

DocMorris quickly proved the use case for their vastly improved search platform. Kalz enthuses that internal complaints around search are becoming fewer and fewer by the day. Recent analytics showed a significant improvement in the company’s sales of its own branded products.

Recent A/B testing reveals that Algolia is helping DocMorris advance its goal of promoting self-branded products, driving a remarkable 156% surge in DocMorris-branded sales and a 147% boost in net sales.

“A/B Testing really saves my day,” Kalz says. “Our stakeholders have very strong opinions on how search should look. Now I can say: let’s test it. And then prove with numbers whether a change has the impact they expect.”

The company’s improvements in search speed and relevance have enhanced the customer experience, resulting in major boosts to key metrics, including:

• An increase of 160% in sessions using search;

• A 112% boost in conversions from search;

• And a 16% drop in zero-click searches. 

Looking forward, DocMorris plans to take even greater advantage of Algolia. Kalz plans to use Algolia’s AI Search capabilities like Collections to improve content discovery and to organize and showcase content beyond its current fixed categories. “With Algolia we are way more flexible. We have more opportunities to boost our search and, ultimately, improve conversions and purchases. We’re really looking forward to releasing Collections in the coming weeks.”

Once the company has implemented Collections, merchandising will be able to easily present users with a mix of dynamic and hand-picked products around specific seasons or themes, based on set rules. It’s part of the company’s vision of making self-managed health more available and accessible.

“We’re looking forward to leveraging Algolia’s innovations to drive search performance and ensure customers find what they are actually looking for,” Tümmers says. “For us, being customer-centric means not simply selling the products with the highest margin but the products demanded by the market. Algolia has been a great partner in achieving that.”