Ideal Steps to Start An Online Medicine Delivery Business

6 min readApr 10, 2020

Ideal Steps to Start An Online Medicine Delivery Business

Glad that you showed interest in starting a business in the ePharmacy industry. The growth of the Global ePharmacy market valued approximately USD 42.32 billion in 2019, and it is anticipated to grow USD 107.53 by 2024. The key factor driving this growth is the increasing use of smartphones and tablets with the “Internet”.

Before getting into How to start an online pharmacy business, let us understand this ePharmacy industry a little more.

Scope For The Business Growth In Epharmacy:

The widespread adoption of eCommerce has assisted ePharmacy to attract a large customer base in both developed and developing countries. According to the world population prospects, approx 2.05 billion people of the world population use eCommerce for the procurement of commodities out of 7.8 billion.

The number was 1.32 billion in 2014 and anticipated to reach 2.14 billion by 2021. Moreover, there are some of the countries where 70 to 80% of internet users make purchases from online stores.

Online medicine delivery app reduces the dependency of the elderly citizens and ill patients towards the third person. The app delivers the ordered medicine and healthcare supplies at customers’ doorstep with an online payment facility. A fresh example is the current situation of the world during the pandemic of Coronavirus.

Right now where people are lockdown into their houses and forbidden to come out to stop the spread of this COVID-19 virus, the government has allowed eCommerce to be active. So, during these days, people are ordering medicines, sanitizers, and other healthcare supplies on pharmacy delivery apps.

The increasing growth of the ePharmacy market and numbers of internet users, state that the demand for e-prescription technology and on-demand medicine delivery services are going to be high on the demand draft. Therefore, investing in a medicine delivery business can generate a huge profit in the future.

Now that you are aware of the online medicine market, let us get you to the point without further ado. So, all ears here!

How to start an online Medicine Delivery Business?

You can consider the upcoming steps as essential ingredients to set up an Online Medicine Delivery Business.

Business Model

Keeping the future of your medicine delivery business in mind, create a robust blueprint for your Medicine Delivery App Development. The business plan should involve capital, investment, asset where you are investing, contact, connections, resources, and many more things. You can create a one-page business model using the Lean Canvas model template.

Among the model, the most important points are:

Market Analysis:

This is a principal segment, you cannot afford to skip to draft a successful business plan. There will be thousands of competitors doing the same business you are going to commence. First, study your competitors intensively, discover their drawbacks and try to make them your plus point.

The second thing is your target audience and their preferences. Use demographics and create and learn buyer personas to know your audience’s needs, preferences, and behavior. Decide the app platforms Android or iOS or both based on the analysis.

Furthermore, the analysis of your target audience will help to build an effective marketing plan and create value for customers.

Partnership with reliable Pharmaceutical companies

To run the online medicine delivery business, you will need to make partnerships with pharmacies, or medicine or drug dealers. You must know how the pharmacy delivery app like Uber for pharmacy works. As soon as the customer confirms the order, the admin assigns a delivery executive to pick up the medicines from the pharmacy to deliver it to the user.

Nevertheless, at the initial stage of the business, you should tie up with only trustworthy pharmaceutical companies to supply your medicine orders. As your business grows, you can gradually tie-up with the other pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

Essential Features

The set of features is the frontline of any mobile application. At this point, you will know what features a medicine delivery app must have and some advanced features that can enhance your app functionality.

Features for Users’ convenience

Registration & Login
Search Medicines
Add to Cart
Compare Products
Place Order
Track Order
Return Order
Product Overview & Insights
Push Notifications
Online Payment
Re-Order
Discount & Rewards
In-app Communication
Review & Rating
Customer Support

Features for the Controler

Dashboard
Marketing Tools (email templates, advertisement, campaign activities, etc)
Monetization (to handle the in-app purchase or subscription plans)
Payment Management
Manage Delivery Partners
Manage Pharmacies
Notification Management

Value-Added Features

Chatbots: Solve user's queries about medicine if they come up with any in real-time with integrating in-app chatbot. Chatbots are machine learning algorithms based (AI) technology that used to provide customers detailed information on their questions.

Prescription Orders: Let your users scan & upload the medical prescription by your medicine delivery mobile app and pharmacist view and suggest the medicine. The feature makes the order process quicker and efficient.

Urgent Delivery Flag: Allow users to use this feature when they need medicines delivered within one day. Provide a one-day delivery service to the urgent delivery flagged orders. You can also put an extra charge on one-day delivery service.

Multiple Payment Options: Not everyone uses the same way to pay online. There are other ways such as Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe, etc., you can integrate into your app according to your audience preferences.

Social Sign-in: One of the most popular and quickest ways to get your users registered on your app is by allowing them to Sign-in with using their social accounts. It saves their time to fill up the details as some of the details can be fetched by their linked account.

Security & Legal Compliance

Since it is about the medicine delivery startup business, this step is crucial to understand before commencing the medicine delivery business. Pharmacy or Drug license is mandatory to start an online medicine delivery business.

State or Central Drugs Standard Control Organization issues Drug or Pharmacy licenses to only pharmacy diploma or degree certified persons. You also need to have trained pharmacists on-board to get the license and start the online pharmacy delivery business.

Hire A Reliable Software Development Company

To shape your medicine delivery app, you need to hire a professional medicine delivery app development company that will build you a high-performing and interactive app. Search a reliable mobile app development company using trustworthy platforms like GoodFirms or Clutch.

For a full-fledged app development service, you can trust on Kody Technolab. As the company has enough experience of development with startups in various sectors including healthcare, eCommerce, FinTech, etc. The company’s processes are transparent and easy to understand yet efficient.

Tips On Reduce Possibilities Of Failure:

There are a few reasons why some medicine delivery apps at the initial level fail. You can use it to secure your app’s success. Find here,

Inefficient Development team- If your app development company does not have sufficient experience in developing medicine delivery apps, your app would be at risk. As they did not have adequate skills, they could not understand the subtle important aspects. Hence, it is advisable to hire only experienced developers to make an app like echo pharmacy and lower the failure risk.

Poor UI/UX- When the user experience and interface are more complex than it should be, it becomes complicated to use the app. Users like to use the app that understands them intuitively and get them what they want. So, ensure you have expert designers for your medicine delivery app that will create appealing and smooth UX.

Lack of Privacy rule compliance- The pharmacy or medicine delivery app must comply with local rules & regulations, depending upon the targeted region. If you miss any of the regulations or rules, then it could be risky for your online pharmacy business.

Inferior Quality Analysis: To ensure the success of your online medicine delivery business, make sure your app is absolutely bug-free. Inaccurate search results for the medicine and diagnosis faulty can create a severe problem for patients and doctors. That’s why the app should undergo all the essential testing processes.

What did You deliver?

To put all things together, now you have the complete guide to start your online pharmacy service with developing a mobile application. Start from the market analysis, know your business prospective buyers, list out app features and hand over to the development company to hit your app development.

Do not forget to comply with the rules and regulations and get your drug license. You’re all good to start your online Medicine Delivery Business now!