How To Stock A Community Pharmacy Shop Using Different Brands

Stocking drug

Stocking the community pharmacy is one of the major processes of running a successful business. It is not all that easy. It includes both drug and non drug products. The type to buy, the brand, the quantity, the wholesale shop to buy genuine and cheap products are all part of the decision. There are so many factors that influence that decision. First is the decision to stock innovator or generic brand.

Read Also: Innovator brand and generic products similarity and difference

Medicine, Drug, Innovator And Generic Brands

A medicine is a combination of an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and or excipients. The API gives the pharmacology response of the drug while the different excipients act as enhancers.

Drugs come with an innovator brand and generic. The innovator brand is the first brand of an active API with its own type of excipients. Generic are other brands with the same API as the innovator brand with the same or different excipients.

Innovator brands are usually expensive and popular. This is because they had made their name selling that particular product over the years their patent lasted.

To clarify it, let us use amoxicillin as an example. Amoxicillin is the name of a drug which is the API. The first company to produce amoxicillin into a medicine is gsk. To enhance the product, they added other excipients. They called their product amoxil. That makes them the innovator brand. After about 20 years of patent, other companies like emzor pharmaceutical started producing amoxicillin with their own excipients or even the same with gsk amoxil. Emzor pharmaceuticals name their own brand emmox. Emmox like others that came after amoxil are called generic brands.

It is not possible to stock all the brands of amoxicillin in the shop. That is because amoxicillin alone has more than 100 brands today. Many people believe that innovator brands are more active than the generic. How best to stock the right brands will be discussed in this post.

There are many classes of drugs in the world. Some treat the same conditions. However, because of cost, side effects and some conditions, some are preferred to treat the condition than others. Also, many drugs are available for treating different conditions.

There are several factors that influence the decision to stock a product. Location plays an important role in making decisions as to what to stock and quantity. The location determines the purchasing power, knowledge about drugs, competition from other community pharmacies, disease prevalence and shelf life.

Rich people can afford innovator brands like amoxil. However, rich people with knowledge about drugs will not hesitate to buy emmox. Also, the rate of the disease can affect how much they buy.

Stocking a particular brand of an API is possible. But that depends on the level of acceptance. But how can a community pharmacy maximize profit and minimize cost. Here is a simple method.

Stocking a Community Pharmacy

Stock all the popular products. That does not necessarily include innovator brands. There are some places that don't buy innovator brands because of maybe the cost. The quantity of the product should be reflective of the rate of sales. It is wrong to buy products of the same API with the same price range. Let the price cover different range. If amoxil is 600 naira, buy other popular brands with their price range downwards until it is affordable by all.

Read Also: How to prevent drug in a community pharmacy from getting expired

However, if you have about five popular brands of amoxicillin, you can add one unpopular brand to it. Some of the unpopular brands can be very cheap. Although, some community pharmacies use high mark-ups for those unpopular brands to make extra profit. It is these unpopular brands that they aggressively market to their customers. So to make extra profit, figure out an unpopular brand and make that brand sell by analysing how it offers the same advantage as the innovator brand yet at an affordable rate.

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