- This websites feels a bit information light. Its like its been written to be like the cool clean startups vs the focus being on providing key information and ability to get there easily. That said I'm low on the technical scale so maybe the githup link and style suits most great.
Are you selling physical or digital products? Anticipated order volume? Need to integrate with 3rd party systems for inventory management, shipping, marketing, accounting, etc.?
It seems there are more than you can shake a stick at (listing these off the top of my head in no particular order, on my phone):
* Woocommerce (plugin for WordPress - PHP) [1]
* Magento (PHP) [2]
* Spree Commerce (Ruby on Rails) [3]
* Saleor (Django/Python) [4]
* Oscar (Django/Python) [5]
Remarkbox[0] recently came up over on the discuss.bootstrapped.fm forums[1] and might suit your needs. I'm not affiliated in any way - your question just happened to jog my memory that I'd read about an alternative recently :)
If you want to ding the seller further, leave a negative feedback response (for the seller) on that order.
Mark the reason as "item not as described" and don't add any additional text that would allow the seller to claim the feedback was "product related / a product review".
Speaking from experience as an FBA seller for the past seven years, those are nearly impossible to dispute with Amazon's seller support staff...even when the buyer is incorrect (ie they contact you via the messaging system and admit to buying the wrong product or misreading the product description). Enough negative feedback ratings and the seller's account can go under review and/or be closed.
If you wanted to be sure it was warranted, take a look at the seller's feedback prior to leaving yours. If there's a hint of buyers with similar issues - fire away with a clear conscience.
If you've opened a dialogue with the seller via the messaging system, you should attach a picture of the item with its packaging. IF the seller is innocent (and consistent in their processes re: labeling), they might be able to open a case with Amazon along the lines of "this was commingled inventory - we always apply our label vertically over the item's barcode and our customer received an item packaged with the barcode applied horizontally...therefore you sent the customer another seller's inventory."
That would be a semi-tenuous case to make, but would have a flying chance of working, particularly if the seller had an inbound shipment for the same SKU that was due to arrive at an Amazon warehouse and had left prior to the customer's issue surfacing.
In general though, if there's a shred of doubt...don't worry about the innocent seller. The seller (hopefully) has enough sales volume that your feedback will be lost in the crowd. If not, well, maybe they aren't a good fit for Amazon and you're doing everyone a favor.
Apple's HealthKit/ResearchKit was extended (maybe 2 years ago?!) to include geo-fencing for basically that use case. Will try to dig up the article or github repo in a bit...
This happens to various degrees in the clinical research industry, depending upon the nature of the work (partly thanks to 21 CFR Part 11!). Several years ago I worked in data management on a maintenance team for clinical trial databases.
Company-wide, there was a rigid system in place that captured electronic signatures as change requests were documented, code was modified, and tests were completed.
Anything that was done flowed through at least those three distinct groups (data team lead, maintenance programmer, & QA). We could easily tell how a study's database had been modified in the past (including who had requested the change, who programmed the change, and who tested the change)...there was always an expectation that every i was dotted, t was crossed (or semicolon was in place) before anyone signed off on their work since it would permanently enter the record and couldn't be erased.
SurveyGizmo is another. Have used them for several years. My general perception over the years has been that SurveyMonkey had shinier marketing, but SurveyGizmo had a solid feature set.
The other comments are on point. From my perspective as someone in the digital health / clinical research industry, the site (as is) raises a bunch of red flags:
- There's no indication this study has received IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval, which is a baseline. Here's a handy reference when asking the question, "Does my research need IRB approval?":
http://www.irb.umn.edu/research.html
Based on several factors, the study/experiment qualifies as research (it meets the requirements for being a systematic investigation, contributing generalizable knowledge, and involving human subjects). IRB review/approval can be fairly straightforward, but does cost a non-trivial amount of money.
Chris, if you need to work with an IRB, I recommend getting in touch with Copernicus Group (http://www.cgirb.com/). I've worked on 20+ projects where they've been the IRB and they've always been responsive and pretty open to innovative ideas.
Echoing rgejman, if you don't have IRB approval, stop everything. Now.
- There's no mention on the site of participants completing an informed consent, which should really be done prior to collecting their money for the kit.
- Has any thought been given to how the team will handle adverse event reporting? This deserves serious consideration and is sometimes overlooked (there are a slew of FDA guidelines/regulations around this). Even for something that seems benign or where "nothing could ever go wrong" - you'd be surprised.
- The site doesn't instill a ton of confidence that data security is a high priority. Using SquareSpace to host the public facing informational portion of the site isn't necessarily a problem, but it leads me to wonder how the team is handling surveys and how the survey data will be stored. It seems like participants will likely provide personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) within surveys, and that's when things start to get a bit more interesting.
- There doesn't seem to be a privacy policy. The About Us page mentions, "We will have a complete policy online before we start taking orders for the first experiment." The SquareSpace checkout appears to be up and running, but I'm unable to find the privacy policy.
There's a more or less standard process for designing, developing, and getting a study out the door (highly simplified, and skewed heavily towards direct to patient studies):
1. Develop your protocol.
2. Get your protocol approved by an IRB
3. Develop/configure the tech to implement the mechanics outlined in the protocol (this can be done in parallel to IRB review and/or protocol development)
4. Recruit patients
5. Collect informed consent, enroll patients
6. Collect data
7. Everything else...
One of the tricks here is that all of the content a patient might see has to be IRB approved.
Want to run ads soliciting your study? They have to be IRB approved.
Want to optimize your ads? Make sure your content is submitted modularly for review (ie, list all your headlines, body content, and images separately - and throw the kitchen sink at any variations you can think of to save yourself another round of review).
Want patients to pay for their kit via a SquareSpace checkout? Probably requires IRB approval, and likely needs to occur after a participant has completed an informed consent doc.
Need to send password reset emails to patients in the event they can't remember their login to access the study survey tool? Has to be IRB approved.
If you wanted to use efficacy tracking as a marketing tool for your supplement business, you might have a bit more leeway if you were to reposition what you're offering. You could (and there's a good chance I'm wrong as this is off the top of my head) simply offer your customers a tool to track the effects of their supplements. This would also help you with reorders by providing an adherence mechanism.
Unfortunately, you'd likely have to scrub using the Double Blinded site, referring to what you're offering as an experiment, or mentioning that the results will be aggregated and published. Data protection issues would still be a serious consideration though.
All of that said, the concept of citizen science and open/transparent studies is very cool. It's just a (minor) hassle to dot all the i's and cross all the t's.
Also, brilliant idea to offer customers a way to track efficacy. I've been toying with similar ideas, so it's cool to see someone else implementing something.
Thanks! Digital health can be incredibly fun and rewarding, but there are plenty of opportunities to run head first into walls you may not have realized even existed.
Aside from the ethics considerations, privacy regulations (and the desire to tread conservatively) can lead to some odd implementation decisions...especially if you're coming into the industry from a general or consumer oriented tech background.
I once worked on a medication adherence project for patients in Italy where patients needed to complete bi-weekly assessments and generally track their medication adherence. We set up a secure portal/website for patients, but were prohibited from emailing them reminders when their next assessment was due.
The sponsor (aka pharma co) was extremely conservative re: patient privacy laws and more or less left it at, "well, the patient will just have to remember to return to the website, log in, and complete their survey at the appointed time." After a couple of months of sub-optimal survey completion rates, they re-evaluated their position and let us send out survey reminder emails.....which is a baseline thing to do when you need to retain participants over the life of a study.
Oddly enough, this was for a commercial project (medication was available on the market, physicians were referring their patients to this website as a value added sort of service) and the commercial side is a bit more wild west than phase 2/3 research. Well, as wild west as the pharma/clinical research industry gets :)
There are parallels between customer acquisition/retention in SaaS and patient recruitment/retention in clinical trials that are pretty interesting...but I think most folks on the Saas side would think the healthcare folks are trying to solve problems with one (if not two) hands tied behind their backs - and in some cases, wouldn't be wrong in thinking so.
Your proposed use case seems like it aligns nicely...