This Indian app promises home-delivery of medicines within 60 minutes

Estores sell almost anything online nowadays. Selling medicines online, however, can be tricky. In India, according to the Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1940, prescription drugs can only be sold by licensed pharmacists. The act also prohibits the sale of over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical medicines (non-prescription medicines) by unlicensed retailers.

Snapdeal recently landed in some trouble for selling prescription drugs on its platform. However, there are a few players who have found a way to make it work. They are aggregators and partner with licensed pharmacists to allow users to buy medicines online. Pluss is one startup working in this area.

This Gurgaon-based startup allows users to buy medicines through its app. Users can upload a photo of their prescription, and then the app lets them select and order individual medicines from their prescription. Orders are delivered to a user within 60 minutes of them receiving an order confirmation SMS.

Users can even provide special instructions about the order – things like whose name it should be billed to. And Pluss’s catalog also has other products that are generally found in a pharmacy. Basically, Pluss is trying to create a full-featured pharmacy for your phone.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Your medicine! Don’t joke around with your health

But Pluss is not actually a pharmacy, and it does not stock any products itself. Instead, it has partnered with many licensed pharmacies who provide the medicines when you order. Pluss generates its revenue by charging its partner pharmacies a percentage of every order they get through the app.

Because people’s health is involved, Pluss must approach its partnerships very seriously. “Any pharmacy who wishes to partner with us has to produce genuine licenses. Just to be doubly sure, our legal team verifies the genuineness of the produced documents,” says Pluss CEO and founder Atit Jain.

It’s also imperative for Pluss to make sure the user-uploaded prescriptions are genuine. Pluss has a pharmacist on its team who checks each and every prescription. “There are ways of verifying the validity of a prescription and we make sure we follow that. We even call the prescribing doctor if we find anything suspicious. Our partner pharmacies provide the second layer of inspection,” Jain adds.

Pluss developed an operations team that ensures orders are delivered smoothly and within 60 minutes. It has its own fleet of delivery workers called ‘Pluss Men’. “We promise to deliver within 60 minutes while other players deliver medicines on a same-day delivery model; some even take a few days. We believe that medicines are an immediate requirement and that any time above one hour is too long. We also guarantee ‘no stockout’ if the drug is available with any chemist within the city limits,” Jain tells Tech in Asia.

Prescription + smartphone = medicine

Pluss was founded by Atit Jain, Madhulika Pandey, and Tarun Lawadia. Jain and Pandey are also the founders of Gigstart, which is a marketplace for party planners to connect and hire artists – singers, DJs, bands, and photographers – for their events. They have now shifted their focus to Pluss – which was conceived in May – and Lawadia joined the team in June as co-founder and COO.

“The decision to move from Gigstart to Pluss was a tough one but it needed to be done. We realized that Gigstart as a concept was quite noble but it was not scalable, while Pluss as a model can be replicated and scaled-up wherever required,” says Jain.

Jain is an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and Lawadia holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in metallurgical engineering from IIT Bombay. Pandey completed her MBA in marketing from University of Pune.

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