Review of online Pharmacies and drugstores in India 2

The ‘eCommerce revolution’ seems to be making inroads into all aspects of life in urban India and is attempting to transform the highly fragmented medical supply and Pharmacy business.

Startups and online ventures are trying to ‘transform’ and ‘disrupt’ the way people buy medicines, herbal products, fitness devices and other medical supplies. However, if I go by my recent experience – in September-October 2017 – the online ventures have a long way to go before they can disrupt the existing brick-and-mortar suppliers.

I live in the heart of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, and as a tech savvy shopper who is comfortable with online shopping, I have been researching and reviewing brick-and-mortar medical suppliers, Pharmacies and online medical suppliers too.

There is a personal angle in reviewing online drugstores: I have been involved in caregiving for an elderly father suffering from a few medical conditions. Part of the responsibility for caregiving involves procuring medicines, drugs and medical supplies. Here is an indicative list of Items I have been shopping for in recent months:

• Cancer drugs (e.g Ablu 50 mg or equivalent anti-androgen Bicalutamide Tablet)
• Drugs for Parkinsons Plus syndrome (Syndopa Plus or equivalent Levodopa Tablet)
• Medical supplies – Urine collection bags, Catheters, latex gloves, cotton wool and other dressing items, disposal bags etc
• Non-medical equipment – Hospital gowns, bed-rest etc
• Vitamins and other supplements

Indian Online Pharmacies : Review criteria

I took a ‘user centric’ view during my review of eCommerce portals and rather than focus on look-and-feel or marchitecture, I got down to the basics. A few basic factors that I considered while preparing for online shopping of medical items and supplies:

• One-stop shop – Availability of all (or most) medicines and medical supplies in my shopping list at a given time.
  • This is important since caregivers and those looking after patients cannot be running from shop to shop or one online-portal to the next in search of medical supplies.
• Ability to buy prescription and non-prescription drugs.
  • Online portals need to allow the ability for users to upload their doctor’s prescriptions to buy prescription medicine.
  • Those shopping for medicines may also shop for non-prescription drugs and other medical supplies
• Discounts and prices
  • Pharmacies and drugstores offer discounts to regular customers, especially for large-volume purchases
  • Online shopping is expected to be cheaper, especially if one combines cashback from websites like topcashback.in
• Shipping and services. I also looked at some of the online reviews and reputation of these drugstores. One wouldn’t want to buy medical supplies from a fly-by-night venture.

Many online portals published have ‘reviews’ of the top-5 or top-10 online drugstores in India. The list generally includes the following.

The review findings

My experience with online drugstores thus far has been very mixed.

• It turns out there are no one-stop online  Pharmacies in India, which is very disappointing for customers. Consumers, especially those looking for medicines, drugs and medical supplies want to shop in a single place. They don’t have the time or the energy to be running from shop to shop or portal to portal looking for drugs to order.
• Most online drugstores and pharmacies that I reviewed seem to carry only limited supplies of items. This is surprising since they can easily develop elastic, on-demand supply chains.

Here is are a few examples during my search of a few items from my list on 1mg.com

Result of search for Urine collection bag: Not available

Result of search for Ablu 50mg Tablet: Sold out

I continued my search on Netmeds.com

Urine Collection Bag: Not searchable!

Search of Ablu 50 mg: No products match your search

I continued my search on ApolloPharmacy.in

Search on ApolloPharmacy.in

Search for ‘Urine bag’ on ApolloPharmacy.in brings up a lot of items totally unrelated to a urine-collection bag!

Customer Handling

After my search through a few ‘top’ online pharmacies, I was frustrated and I decided to change my tactic by contacting the customer service desk of 1mg directly. I got a prompt but utterly inefficient response:

1mg Support <[email protected]> X. Singh (1mg Technologies Private Limited )

Oct 13, 07:52 EDT

Dear Mohan,

Thank you for contacting 1mg!

As per your query regarding Ablu 50mg Tablet availability with 1mg. We would like to inform you that the medicine is not available and apologize for the inconvenience this is causing you.

We request you to check the medicine availability in 6-7 days. Once it is available, the same will be updated on our portal.

Stay Healthy!

XXX Singh

Team 1mg!

Discounts and prices: All over the place

The price of prescription medicines, drugs and supplies seem to vary widely across the eCommerce sites. Many of these websites are trying hard to entice customers with discounts “20% off” etc but add a high shipping and handling cost.

Bottomline:   Mr. Singh’s reply was exactly the kind of response my parents would probably have received at the local pharmacy 20 or 30 years ago. This sounded like  “Please check back with us in a week to see if we have the medicine”  I was left shaking my head over the inefficiencies in the online drugstores’ supply chains in India.

This empirical research and search highlights a real big challenge: many online drugstores in India don’t seem to have all the medical supplies like cotton or latex gloves a customer would need. If I were to order the supplies individually from different sites, and include the cost of shipping, the discounts can be instantly negated.

The Elephant in the room: Amazon.in

Every challenge and a gap in the market leads to opportunities for enterprises. While online drugstores in India flounder, the big-daddy of eCommerce, Amazon.in has slowly been expanding into this space.

During my online search, I was pleasantly surprised to find Amazon offering a wide variety of medical supply items I needed (except of course prescription medicines). Link to a few items I purchased on Amazon.in and my reviews

Suppliers on Amazon seem to be offering a wide variety of medical supplies at a very reasonable price. When one adds the convenience of Amazon Prime and their logistics, this turns out to be a surprisingly good deal.

This shouldn’t have surprised me since I had blogged about Amazon a while ago (ref: What’s the big deal about $1 out of every $2 spent online in the US going to Amazon?)

All rights reserved | Compiled and edited by Mohan K |