In dealing with medical supply store websites, you need to check them out for legitimacy, security, and quality of products. The expense of medical supplies in brick-and-mortar offline establishments can be sky high, but with the use of the internet for businesses to reach the entire world with little or no advertising expense, distribution volume can make prices lower than at any other time in recent history. Due to this ease in commerce however, just about anyone can throw together a website to make a pretty penny - so there needs to be a way to ensure that you are dealing with professionals. Let's look further into just how this can be done...
When you find a medical supply store online, see to it that the website is indeed owned by the person actually distributing the wares. There are some sites out there that are merely affiliate portals with commission tracking links to many other actual establishments. This is all fine and good, and in no way dealing badly, but if you were to ever require that a return be made on a few products purchased through one of these, you may find that the website owner is not the one to deal with. There would have to be the other companies you actually made purchases with to contact, perhaps many. This can be quite a hassle, especially since not every establishment may have the same or similar return policies.
Another thing to check out with a medical supply store online is security - make sure that all monetary transactions are encrypted. Further, see that there are a number of ways to pay offered, such as with all major credit cards, through the use of different online banking establishments (like PayPal, or Google Checkout, etc.), and others. If you are in the medical field and are looking for supplies for your place of business, you might want to see if they allow payment through online checking, and if they can work with corporate accounts.
Another big thing to watch for is you'll need to look into what they offer for a return policy. Make sure that everything about the policies they have regarding returns is every bit agreeable with you. While offering credit towards future purchases as a means of returns is quite alright as a single option among many, it really isn't all that great if this is their sole and only means of refunding you with what you have paid them. Medical supply store websites need to be full of options both for payment, and receiving refunds from them. If one site leaves much to be desired, move on to another one and check them out. There's certainly a lot of competition out there, so use this to your advantage.