"White Label" means you have an on-line store in your website when in actual fact (and this is made plain to customers in the final step of the payment process) the online shopping on your site is provided by us through our investor and partner's licensed internet pharmacy warehouse. We maintain the product database, manage stock, packaging, postage, customer service, order tracking, refunds, distance selling laws etc
All the customer data and their sales data is yours.
You receive 50% of the profit on the sales (ex VAT) from your site and you retain ownership of all your registered customers’ sales data. The more you sell higher the profit share rises in your favour (ie 55%, 60% etc).
We have the right to use sales data to provide a competitve and effective service for you.
We retain the right to change this percentage but you also have the right to leave whenever you wish or to have the service switched off and to replace it with your own operation and you will have all your existing customers and their sales data with which to do so.
Having this facility will not cannabalise sales in your store. For most independent pharmacists, retail sales make up a small part of their business. The customers who regularly visit your store will probably continue to do so and people will still need to make acute purchases. The rest of your customers are making their regular retail purchases from supermarkets, high street chemists or increasingly online. Online, people are even more price sensitive and it is very easy to find who has the best price. As well as Chemist Direct and other agressive online pharmacies, Amazon now sells an ever growing selection directly. Discounting is brutal and there is no way the vast majority of independent pharmacies can buy cheaply enough to compete. Our ecommerce solution enables you to win back this business through offering the best prices and a huge range.
The cost of setting and running an e-commerce operation is considerable - both in cash and resources; in the region of £15,000-20,000 + the ongoing costs of maintaining an accurate up to date product database. Margins for on-line retail sales are much slimmer as the market is very price sensitive. If you cannot offer comparable prices to Chemist Direct, Pharmacy2u, Oneclick, Express Chemist, Tesco, Superdrug, Asda etc you will not sell very much. Given the margins, you would have to be generating volumes of £15-25k per month to pay back the cost of investment alongside running costs within the first couple of years. To achieve that sort of tunrover, you will probably have to invest in internet marketing which will add further cost, pushing your breakeven point even further. It will be much more profitable for you to concentrate on marketing to your own existing customers initially and in your local area. We will also be offering internet marketing servcies you would not normally be able to access without committing to budgets in excess of £100k per year for those of you that want to invest in your e-commerce. When you have built up a good customer base and know the repeat purchase rate and annual value of a repeat customer, then you can make a much better informed economic decision on whether it is worth setting up your own e-commerce operation.