Amazon pharmacy.
It all started with books, when Jeff Bezos dreamed of modernizing the market and moving away from the age-old concept of physical bookstores. The idea quickly became successful, and stores suddenly found themselves reluctantly fighting for their right to exist when they encountered a new truth: consumers overwhelmingly preferred the ease and convenience of online shopping. Soon, this small success quickly spread to the world of retail, helping Amazon spread into the e-commerce and consumer retail giant it is today.
Although the company had humble beginnings, over the past two decades Amazon has caused massive disruption across a wide range of industries and has truly transformed and redefined the practice of online retail. Now the company aims to apply the same principles of convenience, affordability and easy access to yet another legacy business: retail pharmacies.
In fact, the country has already made significant progress in this area. Since launching in 2020, Amazon Pharmacy has quickly innovated the way customers can access pharmacy products in easier and more affordable ways. For example, last year it announced a discount program that automatically offers significant discounts on certain medications. It also announced it would pilot a drone delivery program, with an ambitious goal of achieving a 60-minute delivery time for prescription medications. Moreover, the country has also made remarkable strides to collaborate with Amazon One Medical, the company’s primary and virtual care service.
In its latest announcement last week, Amazon Pharmacy announced that it plans to open pharmacies in 20 new cities by 2025, with the aim of nearly doubling the number of communities where customers can use its same-day prescription drug delivery service. These cities include Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia and many more, meaning millions of people will have quick access to medicine.
Dr. Vin Gupta, Chief Medical Officer of Amazon Pharmacy, comments on what this expansion to 20 new cities will enable: “Speed and convenience are hallmarks of the modern experience patients will enjoy at Amazon Pharmacy… especially as we approach the winter cold and flu season Fast delivery of medicines such as an anti-infective can mean the difference between a quick recovery at home or a long hospital stay.”
Amazon drone delivery pilot.
Similar to what Amazon did for books and more broadly for retail as a whole, the company undoubtedly has opportunities as attractive as the pharmacy sector. For almost a century, customers have had to go to traditional pharmacies to pick up their medications. This often entails waiting times of an average of 3-5 days before prescribed medications are prepared and delivered. More recently, in the past decade, these traditional pharmacies have seen the need to make this an easier process for customers, and have introduced mail delivery. For example, both are among the most prominent pharmacy chains Wal vegetables And CFS offering reasonably robust medication and refill services via mail delivery.
But as with everything, the devil is in the details, and the customer experience is indeed of the utmost importance. To win this battle, Amazon Pharmacy is leveraging the principles and insights the company has learned from more than 20 years of unprecedented retail success, applying its rules of convenience and creating seamless customer journeys for the pharmacy industry. This is a natural runway for the company, especially considering that Amazon Pharmacy is a digital-first service and therefore doesn’t have to worry about the performance of brick-and-mortar stores or the economies of scale that brick-and-mortar customers bring. -oriented settings often entail. As John Love, Vice President of Amazon Pharmacy explains, “we pair our clinical teams with Amazon’s leading technicians to help customers enjoy a simple checkout experience, clear pricing directly on our site, and fewer hoops to jump through when purchasing. seeking care.”
Furthermore, Amazon already has an incredibly mature and developed supply chain, fulfillment, logistics and delivery network, meaning the infrastructure it works with is incredibly strong. If Walgreens or CVS tried to bring same-day delivery to the same scale, they would require massive infrastructure and capital investments.
Undoubtedly, the company is slowly but surely creating a ‘new normal’ with this work. The ability to enable fast delivery and deliver a digital-first customer experience creates enormous positive pressure that forces the industry (and other market players) to innovate or succumb to irrelevance. These pressures have introduced a degree of healthy competition into this arena. Both Walgreens and CVS have invested a significant amount of money in offering more digital-first services to customers, including easy ordering capabilities and medication management through their mobile applications. Walmart has invested significant resources to streamline its rapid fulfillment process, and has introduced numerous new programs to make medicines more cost-effective for customers. Other non-traditional players, such as Instacart And DoorDashare trying to get into this game by offering new ways to connect customers with traditional pharmacy retailers. Other startups in this industry such as GoodRx And Express scriptsare rapidly investing in their infrastructure to provide faster delivery and faster access. Time will tell which business models will ultimately succeed.
Although the world of retail pharmacy itself is over a century old, the rapidly changing landscape of consumer expectations, the burgeoning market pressures brought about by bold innovation, and the expanded possibilities introduced by technological leaps have all made this one of the most exciting and fastest growing worlds created. evolving industries to date.