If you are someone who has completed a bachelor’s or master’s degree in pharmacy or someone who wants to hire a professional and wants to start a medical store but is unsure about how to start a pharmacy business, then don’t worry, as we have got you covered. The pharmacy business is one of the most lucrative and rewarding business. Starting a pharmacy business from scratch can be a little tasking, but it is faster and profitable than buying an already established pharmacy store.
Today’s market is extremely competitive and requires a lot of patience, hard work, and determination until it achieves stability and success.
Now, if you already have a pharmacy business idea and are willing to take the next step towards its establishment, sales, and marketing, then the following points will help you create a profitable pharmacy business:
5 ways to create a profitable pharmacy business
1. Building customer relationship
As an independent medical shop, it’s essential to maintain good relations with your customers as your customer expect a pharmacist who can provide credible information and show some care.
According to local research, it has been found that the main reason why customers are loyal to their pharmacists is because of this warm and personal relationship. It’s also seen that customers also buy personal care items from them, coupled with medicines.
The trust and confidence that your customers get from you when you invest time in talking to them pay off eventually. You can also store their information like phone number, address, and name and send them messages regarding special offers on products they frequently buy or restock of products they have been looking for.
You can also offer your customers the service of free home delivery within a mentioned radius of distance upon purchase of a specific amount to grow your pharmacy business. This will make your customers choose you over and again as this is something most medical shops don’t offer.
These offers and perks don’t have to at the cost of your profit or margin. With proper planning and strategy, you can make a fair and reliable decision to offer these services.
2. Adoption of a pharmacy POS software
A pharmacy POS Software is truly a godsend in today’s technology-driven fast world. Your customers don’t wish to wait for long durations to get their medicines, neither do you want to engage in a traditional way of handling books and bills, especially when you plan to expand your pharmacy business.
A Medical POS system provides your medical shop with a real-time detailed sales report. This allows you to assess the products which are popular and in-demand and the products which are lagging behind. You can then implement your marketing strategies accordingly to boost sales of popular products further.
A pharmacy POS software also improves your customer relationship management as the transactions get processed quicker. As products get scanned for their price, billings are more accurate, lessening the number of discrepancies that used to happen when bills were made manually.
As a responsible pharmacy business, it’s your responsibility to keep the inventory managed and not run out of medicines, especially the ones that are commonly used and the ones that are life-saving. The inventory management feature of the POS system comes to your rescue as it can manage the inventory and helps in reordering products when they are running low. The Pharmacy POS software will remind you that it’s time you reorder so you can keep track around peak selling time.
3. Offer stellar services
As a pharmacy shop that you want to flourish, you can sell personal care, and daily use healthy products like supplements, diet food, skincare products, or personal hygiene items. This will let your customer look forward to things to buy that they weren’t primarily requiring, but now that your front display looks attractive with a range of products and special offers, they might have a change of heart.
Your customers come with different priorities set in their minds, and as an independent pharmacy, they look forward to the service you provide.
Asking your customers for feedback on their shopping experience and expectations not only helps you in making improvisation in the way you do pharmacy business but also shows the customers that you care about their needs.
In reality, the suggestions made by your customers could be easy and very simple yet effective to implement as well.
4. Strategic placement of products
The way you plan your layout and in-store merchandising to make it more efficient and credible makes a difference in your customer footfall and sales. Many pharmacists have found that front-end sales have seen an upsurge because of their concrete and robust floor plan, planograms, and merchandise that sell.
Always try to keep your designs fresh and creative as people get attracted to things that are new and not copied or repetitive. Try to revamp the whole space at least once every month to offer a new attraction to capture the attention of your customers.
It is a well-known fact that your store’s appearance plays an important part in influencing sales.
Imagine an unkempt pharmacy store, with limited or no parking space, dim lighted, little stock kept here and there, and not a welcoming atmosphere.
Now imagine a pharmacy that offers attractive discounts with a pleasing ambiance and soothing atmosphere. Naturally, a person would prefer the latter over the former. Therefore, a pharmacy business needs to offer an attractive front end and lasting first impression to make customers choose your pharmacy.
If you carefully analyze and make a note of the shopping habits of your customers as in what products do they buy in combination, you could place them in the same way. Visual merchandising techniques help customers to purchase things quickly without moving in the entire store.
Say, if a customer wants to purchase smoking deterrence like a nicotine patch, then most likely he could also purchase mints and mouth fresheners, so instead of keeping these products on opposite ends of the store, you could place them together.
Similarly, placing chocolates or eatables with high sugar content next to diabetes medicine won’t be a great idea, and maybe you could replace the former with sugar-free products. Therefore, locating items in the store and at the same time, cross-promoting can boost sales for your pharmacy business.
5. Comprehensive planning of the pharmacy business model
Just like any other business, the pharmacy business also works on the 4Ps of marketing:
1. Product
Keeping in stock the medicines and other products as per the need of the customers.
2. Price
Selling pharmacy items at the right price, mentioning the right price on the shelf, and communicating the right price by the salesperson at the store to steer away from any miscommunication.
3. Placement
Proper placement of the products across the store for easy and quick purchasing.
4. Promotion
Attracting your customers through offers, discounts, and other methods of promotion can give you a good margin and profits.
Taking care of these aspects will result in more customers, growth of the pharmacy business, and higher profitability.
The ever-evolving retail industry needs viable, robust technology solutions to keep up with the changing times and walk on a growth path.
One of the key tools that enable the retail businesses to carry out their operations smoothly is the point of sale (POS) software.
A POS System not only helps in inventory management and sales process, but also proves to be valuable for data collection and reporting, automation of tasks, customer management, and supervision of employees.However, the point where retailers can bring in a difference from other retail businesses is selecting the right POS system.This selection is based on the harmony between their business requirements and the critical functionalities of the POS software.
It enables the executive or retailer to take payments through multiple payment options such as cash, credit/debit card, gift card, loyalty programs, mobile payments, etc.
Few of the key features in POS software that facilitate inventory management are:Setting up a product catalog in the POS system is necessary to remain aware of the products, their quantities, their features, and their substitutes.The stock-taking feature enables the retailers to keep track of the quantity of the products available in the store and products needed to be restocked.POS software facilitates defining a minimum level; if the product stock in the store falls below this level, automatically order is generated.POS system has the feature of managing multi-store inventory or multi-channel inventory in the case of centralized inventory management of multiple stores or selling through various channels.Pro-shopper tacticsPro-shopper tactics are essential for retailers to augment their customer base and increase their sales volume.
Maintaining a customer database, including information on customer demographics and purchase histories, can help create personalized services.
Small and large businesses require point-of-sale (POS) systems to complete sales transactions.
It is the point where a customer makes the payment for goods or services.
It saves timeSpeed up the checkout process – Scan it and bag it.
Every item with a barcode can be easily scanned and tagged.
Just carry an iPad or iPhone enabled POS system with a credit card reader and you’re ready to go.Speed up Inventory management – With a built-in inventory and barcode scanning system, you won’t have to rifle through many options when ringing up a sale.
It’s automatically deducted from your current inventory, so you won’t have to manually do it.Faster payroll processing – The system will automatically compute payroll and can even print out a pay slip for your employees.
