Many offices must face the decision of whether or not carrying products for their patients will work for them. A dentist I recently spoke to told me that they felt adding a retail section to their office would just add another full time job to their current workload – who would buy all of the products? Where would they buy it from – the manufacture or a third party, like Amazon? How do they know they’re getting the best price for their patients? Will I even be able to make any profit off of this? Oh wait… and what if no one buys the products I sell? I’m sure you’ve had all of these thoughts… so know you’re not alone!

If you’re reading this right now, you must either be considering carrying products, or you’re trying to figure out to do it better. Luckily for you, I’ll address both!

Carrying products has a TON of benefits. Most importantly, by ensuring your patient gets the best care possible, both in and out of your office. We all know that 3 out of 4 patients don’t comply with your recommendations – by offering the products they need (for maintenance) they are more likely to follow your guidance and have better check ups.

Offering products like electric toothbrushes, specialty toothpastes and rinses also saves your patient time and money! Why make them go to the store when they can get it from you as they are leaving your office.

Speaking of stores – did you know the products that retailers are carrying are inferior to the products you can be carrying in your office? Let’s take Crest White Strips for example, retailers sell nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of these every single year! Your office can get a piece of the pie by offering these to your patients, too – but only you get to offer the professional grade version. They have nearly 3x as many strips, 3 times stronger, and cost just about the same. Which do you think your patients would buy?

Now, let’s talk money. Obviously, you’re not going to become a billionaire from selling products, but you will certainly increase your profits per patient. For simplicity sake, let’s say you see on average 10 patients per day and your average profit per sale of an electric toothbrush was $25. If one out of every ten patients bought this electric toothbrush that would be on average an additional $500 in profits every single month!

Now that we’ve covered all the great things about selling to your patients – let’s tackle the challenges. Starting with maintaining inventory – who will do this for you? It’s important to prevent inventory loss – whether it be monitoring expiration dates or counting inventory to keep track of lost and stolen products. You should consider having a dedicated person that takes on this duty. Another thing to consider is return policy – what if a patient just doesn’t like the product after they’ve already opened it? How will you handle this? How strict will you be? Most importantly, you must consider the initial investment and risk that goes into purchasing all these products upfront.

DentalStores provides an alternative to this. DentalStores is an e-commerce service for dental offices – providing all of the inventory, customer service and support and gives you commissions on everything you sell. You’ll never have to waste time and money buying products for your office – DentalStores carries over 500 professional grade products for you to sell to your patients with just a click of a button – literally.. Its super simple all you need to do tell your patients about your service And they take care of the rest; inventory, customer service, and returns.

To learn more you can visit DentalStores.com or call 1-800-SMILEOK-7.