How To Establish A Retail Pharmacy

Retail Pharmacy is a place where medicines are sold to patients most often with a prescription. You can also buy your OTC medications and hygienics from a retail pharmacy.

It can be a lucrative business if it is well managed but starting one may be a bit cumbersome because of the requirments and regulations.

Starting a New Retail Pharmacy.

There are so many considerations to make before and as you are about to start a retail pharmacy. Some of the consideration are as follows:

Location

Like every other business, location is a major part of the consideration. A retail pharmacy needs to be sited where it will be accessible to the people. That means It should be located where there is high human leg traffic.

Depending on the laws of the land, one of the best places to site a retail pharnacy is near big hospitals and clinics. Retail pharmacy can also be sited in big shopping areas and shoping malls with high human traffic.

Location is one of the most important factor to consider before you establish a retail pharmacy.

Meeting Regulatory Requirements

Depending on the country where you are, the regulations are varied. You need to visit the authorities in charge of the regulations in your state to be briefed on the regulatory requirements.

If you are not a pharmacist, you will have to employ a pharmacist who is most likely to know the requirements and who is going to register the pharmacy on your behalf. The pharmacist must be a licensed pharmacist for that to be possible.

Pharmacy Design

This is another important aspect you will need to consider from the beginning. There are different type of pharmacy design. Some people prefer walk-in design where potential shoppers can walk into the pharmacy and look around to pick some products that are not core pharmacy products.

There is also a design that stops people over the counter. I can call this over-the-counter design. Here, shoppers are stopped by a stopper and they are handed items over the counter.

Both designs have merits and demerits. The walk-in design like a conventional shopping mall can make a shopper see more than the items he/she wants because he is able to walk around inside the pharmacy. It encourages impulse spending. The problem with this is that there are higher chances of pilferage than the over-the-counter design.

Over-the-counter design majorly guides against pilferage and nothing more. It is more of an unpopular design especially if you can afford to wire the whole pharmacy with a close circuit television(cctv) where someone can monitor the movement of people and catch a potential thief.

You can build the shelves with any material you like. There are different type of synthetic designs being sold by many companies.

Starting Up

Depending on the regulation of your country, you may not advertise a new pharmacy. You may have to let people discover it. This should not be a problem if your location was right.

You may also need the services of a pharmacy assistant or technician as business continue to grow.

Pharmacy Software choice can make you or mar you. You need to chose the right software from the beginning. Your software should be able to do the following:

- Track expiry dates, - Support first in first out sales, - Support both vendor return and customer return, - Support physical inventory taking or stock taking, - Support inventory adjustment, - Track customer purchases, - Should be easy to integrate with other software like dosage and prescription software, - Should be able to track your tax and so on, - Should be able to give you insight on the profitability of the business on a simple click of the mouse, - Should be highly malleable and scallable.

Stocking The Pharmacy

This is very important especially as a beginner. You are not yet sure of what sells in your location. I will advice that you stock more than OTC drugs than POM medication when you are starting. Also make sure you factor in the expiry dates of the medications you want to stock. This is to avoid the expiry of the medications as this can amount to big loss.

Let people's demand determine what more you can stock over time. You will need to have out-of-stock register to document all the products people are looking for which you do not have.

Poison Box And Register: you will have to buy a poison box and register where all the poisons will be locked up and sales documented. Again depending on the regulation of your country, this may not be very important.

Conclusion,

Pharmacy business is a lucrative one. This is more so for the fact that it is not a business everyone wants to dive into. You are likely to break even in a shorter period than most conventional trading businesses.

If you have the capital, consider starting a retail pharmacy business in your area today.

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