Buying medicine online: Comparing the convenience, quality, and price of online vs. offline medicine (Preprint)

BACKGROUND People buy medicines online for various reasons, such as convenience and cost savings. In Indonesia, the Ministry of Health allows registered platforms to sell medicines online; however, unregistered sellers are still widely circulated. While numerous studies have highlighted the quality of online medicines, comparisons with medicines purchased from licensed physical pharmacies are rare. OBJECTIVE To explore the conveniences of buying medicine online on several online platforms in Indonesia, investigate the quality, and compare the price and quality of medicine bought online to medicine purchased in physical pharmacies. METHODS The online sellers were categorised by regulatory status, and the conveniences of each were explored. Between February and May 2022, samples were collected from 732 physical pharmacies and 328 online platforms. Quality and price comparisons were conducted across different types of medicine sellers. RESULTS Obtaining samples from other online sellers was not always easy. Some platforms have complex registration processes, and we found locating unregulated sellers challenging. Notably, 58.8% of sampled medicines exceeded the median retail price from physical pharmacies for the same dose and form. Branded generic medicines exhibited the widest price variation, ranging from 0.15 to 16.4 times the median offline retail price, while generic medicines ranged from 0.18 to 4.1 times. Regarding quality, the failure rates were 7.9% online and 8.7% offline, showing no significant difference. Among online sellers, unregulated ones had a higher failure rate (11.2%) compared to regulated (3.0%) and semi-regulated (4.5%) sellers. Antibiotics were 2.6 times more likely to fail quality tests than other medicines (13.8% vs. 5.1%). CONCLUSIONS The conveniences of purchasing medicine online vary among sellers, and prices are not consistently lower than offline sellers. In terms of quality, as long as patients buy medicine online from regulated sellers, they don’t have to worry about the quality of medicines.