YoPharma is a Delhi based online pharmacy offering medical supplies. It was started by Chavvi Gupta and Himanshu Goel in 2012. Goel has a pharma background, having worked with the Guardian chain of pharmacies that has over 300 stores in India, as their retail operations head. He has also worked as a pharmacist with Apollo. In part 1 of our interaction with them, the two co-founders talk about setting up an online pharmacy business, operations, building trust among new users, target segment and other aspects of the business: - Traditional pharmacy vs online pharmacy MediaNama: When did you begin your business? Why specifically ecommerce with a focus on pharmaceuticals? YoPharma: We started 6 months ago but launched the online service only a month back. The service is currently live in Delhi and NCR. The major reason for starting this as an online business was that e-commerce gives us a great alternative distribution platform. We see a lot of inherent problems in the traditional pharmacy system. Very few (pharmacy/medical) brands have 50+ stores in the country. Most of the guys are local and end up setting 2-3 stores in the neighbourhood or city. When you don ‘t have organized service, you lose out on the quality of service. Secondly, based on negotiation, the traditional pharmacies can offer discounts of around 5% and if the customer is close enough (physically) then the pharmacist might do a home delivery. At Yopharma, these are the basic services that we provide. Our service starts after this point. Once…
