Online Pharma Shopping – Most Popular in Sweden

Online pharmacies are currently experiencing their golden hours – hitting two nerves at once in a still corona-shaped world: On the one hand, like most other eCommerce players, they ride the wave of a generally accelerated digital transformation fueled by the pandemic. On the other hand, they serve people’s growing need and demand for hygiene and disease prevention and the related products. In Mexico, for example, several online pharmacies rose to the top of the country’s leading online stores, having multiplied their eCommerce net sales several times during the pandemic. But online shopping for pharmaceutical products has become popular also in other parts of the world, as Klarna’s recent Shopping Pulse survey shows:

In a survey among more than 11,000 consumers in 11 countries conducted between January and March 2022, Klarna found out that, on average, pharmaceutical products are still among those categories which are primarily bought offline: 56% of consumers still buy pharmaceutical products in stationary stores – only 23% turn to online sources. Only groceries reach higher offline shares. A look at individual selected countries and genders, however, reveals significant differences. In Sweden, for example, shopping for pharmaceutical products online is almost as popular as buying them offline: On average, 46% of Swedish consumers buy pharmaceutical products online. The share among women is even higher: With 51%, more than half of Swedish female consumers buy pharmaceutical products from online sources – compared to 41% of male consumers. These are, for both genders, by far the highest online shares. Austria, Germany, and Belgium follow with around one in three women and one in four men shopping for pharmaceutical products online. The U.S., Finland, and the Netherlands play a special role in the comparison: They are the only countries in which men more frequently shop for pharmaceuticals online than women. With a difference of 6 percentage points, the gap is most pronounced in the U.S.: While almost one fourth of men in the U.S. shop for pharmaceutical products online, only 17% of women do. French consumers are the least eager online shoppers in the pharmaceutical products comparison among the selected countries. Only 12% of French consumers on average shop for pharmaceuticals online. With 13%, the share is a little higher among women.