If you are running a pharmaceutical business, you have probably encountered challenges like long waiting queues, lost orders, unsatisfied customers, and stockouts. Dedicated pharmaceutical software, like pharmacy apps, can easily resolve these and other issues.
This article will provide an overview of the main types of pharmacy apps and explain what they can do for your business. We’ll also describe the process of building a pharmacy app.
Let’s get started!
Business of Pharmacy Apps: Key Stats
When asking yourself whether it’s worth investing in pharmacy apps, the best way to find the answer is to see what others do. The investment into ePharmacy soars: the market grows at 13.3% yearly and is predicted to reach USD 263.3 by 2032 – a huge increase from over 90 billion in early 2025. At the same time, GrandView Research offers even more stunning numbers: according to the resource, the ePharmacy market will grow at the rate of 20% a year in this decade. Since the market shows no signs of decay, it’s worth considering pharmacy app development.
Types of Pharmacy Apps
Before we delve into the variety of pharmacy apps, let’s focus on their main purpose: transforming customer experiences. With an app, a customer gets better visibility on their prescriptions, keeps historical information of orders, and has a chance to track medical expenses, among many other things. Therefore, most pharmacy apps we have today are customer-centric and revolve around such features as ordering, tracking, and education. Hence, here are the main types of pharmacy apps:
- Mobile apps for drug stores: Such an app allows customers to order and manage their orders online, create and use family accounts, track order delivery status, and get notifications about medications. These apps can be developed for individual drug stores or a whole chain of pharmacies.
- Pharmacy aggregators: An aggregator is an app that scraps the needed information from different pharmacy databases. Such an app, for example, can help you find a needed medication in the closest pharmacy shop, make a reservation, or order a product online.
- ePrescription apps: Sometimes, customers forget to renew a prescription for some medicine they need in the shortest time. An ePrescription app can solve this issue by allowing customers to demand a prescription online and receive it shortly after their doctor approves it.
- Medical reference applications: These types of pharmaceutical apps are dedicated to educating users on healthcare products, drug compatibility, possible allergy reactions, etc.
You can build either specific pharma apps or ones that combine numerous features. The best way to select between the two is to first check what your audience needs and then fulfill their wishes through an application’s functionality.
Benefits of Building a Pharmacy App
A pharmacy app will benefit both a business and its customers. The key benefits you receive from pharma apps are as follows:
- Increased sales: Mobile apps give the convenience of couch-shopping and online marketing, which eventually leads to increased sales. A recommendation mechanism based on previous user orders and user behavior, upselling and cross-selling activities, multiply the chances of increased sales.
- Customer loyalty: People value experiences and attention to their needs. Having a convenience to avoid long pharmacy queues is a great plus by itself, but having an app also means loyalty programs, seasonal sales, and promotions based on customer personal choices.
- Lower operating costs: A pharmacy app will give better visibility into your sales, allow you to trace seasonal trends, and adjust accordingly. Additionally, the app will improve inventory management by helping avoid stockouts or extra expenses for unneeded products.
Since the benefits of having a pharma app are too obvious to avoid getting one for yourself, let’s now discuss how to build one step-by-step.
How to Build a Pharmacy App?
Every software development project consists of five min stages: idea discovery, prototyping, development, release, and maintenance. Let’s review each of the steps closer:
- Discovery: At this stage, a development team and a product owner develop the concept of the future app, check similar apps on the market, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and decide on the unique value proposition their application will offer to the audience. At this step, it is also important to decide on the features because the selected functionality will influence the future tech stack.
- Prototyping: At this stage, the concept is brought to life. Most often, developers create a minimum viable version of the product to check its usability and polish the idea of the product. Quite often, this is done with the help of DIY app builders, who are perfect for prototype building.
- Development is the most important stage of the project, as the whole product is brought to life. It is also the longest and most cost- and effort-consuming part, and it can take 3 to 12 months or more.
- Release: At this step, the app sees the sun of the day, and the first users can try it to see if it’s as functional and innovative as they hoped. Therefore, collecting maximum user feedback for further development and improvement is very important.
- Ongoing maintenance and support: As the app goes live, it may be vulnerable to attacks and breakdowns. Therefore, it will require ongoing maintenance, frequent updates, and technical support.
Important Consideration
Since the pharma app contains a good deal of sensitive information, like identity and medical data, security and compliance rules and best practices should be followed. It is very important that an app doesn’t break handy regulation standards like HIPPA, GDPR, or the California Act. This means that users should have complete transparency on how and where their data is shared and the option to opt out of any permissions for data exchange with third parties.
Final Words
In a world where “there is an app for everything,” having an app to manage your medical needs is more of a necessity than a techie perk. Therefore, a pharmacy business that offers its customers such a luxury will be at the forefront of the competition.
