Customer profile analysis of the mail-order pharmacy MedicineGo using the example of the German mail-order pharmacy MedicineGo

Abstract

Pharmacies in transition - digitalisation measures, connection to the telematics infrastructure and the oligopoly position of leading mail-order pharmacies. Not only meeting the technical implementations in the digital transformation, but also satisfying customers are important issues for public pharmacies. While retail pharmacies have access to data on their regular customers, we know little about customers of mail-order pharmacies. As the trend to order medicines online grows, mail-order medicines will take on an increasingly important role. It is expected that the planned introduction of electronic prescriptions in Germany in mid-2021 will lead to a further increase in online sales.
 The research question is: What does the customer profile of a mail-order pharmacy look like? Thus, this study focuses on an economic customer profiling of a mail-order pharmacy using the example of the nationally operating mail-order pharmacy MedicineGo. Based on the assumption that younger people between 18 and 50 years of age prefer to use the internet as an ordering medium, due to a more savvy use of computers, a quantitative analysis of empirical data will present essential market research data. In order to interpret the results of the quantitative analysis and to establish causalities, additional expert interviews with the MedicineGo administrator and other employees of the mail-order pharmacy as well as a qualitative literature analysis were conducted by means of qualitative analysis.
 By means of quantitative analysis, it was empirically shown that with regard to the customer profile of the mail-order pharmacy MedicineGo, 72% of customers use the direct web shop as a sales channel for their orders, the proportion of women is about ten percentage points higher than that of men, and the largest purchasing groups by number of orders are persons between 51 and 80 years of age. The quantitative analysis showed that older people (over 50 years) prefer to use the mail-order pharmacy, so another result of the study is that public pharmacies compete with mail-order pharmacies for the same customer group.