Farma2go turns 10 years In the market and we talk with your CEO, Jorge Peláezthat history, challenges, achievements and plans in the future in a vertiginous and revealing talk of a highly competed sector, which has its tricks and its own language: «We are a squirrel in a field of Buldóceres. We cannot compete with market giants, so we must win in agility, ”compares Jorge. In that sense, he acknowledges that the company has been “launch head in many things,” a lung and in self -taught mode.
Currently, Farma2go sells throughout the euro zone, especially in markets such as Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Germany. He 95% of its turnover comes from online And 20% of its app, which has just launched just a month ago in its second version. It has 40 thousand references and 200,000 registered people In your mail list. Annually, Invoice about 10 million euroswith a Middle Ticket of € 65and its two battle knights are the price and speed in delivery.
Farma2go website
Although, such an intense decade is not summarized in an interview or in a LinkedIn post, Jorge has written very felt words about business in his social network profile: «It is not easy, nothing, not a little, to lift an ecommerce from 0 in a sector as competitive as ours and without investors, godparents or aid of the political/pharmaceutical environment. Go know why, but I think that proposals for value like ours deserve that support »:
From Marketing4commerce we contacted Jorge to investigate more deeply on each of these points.
A family business that combines on and offline
Farma2go was born in 2015 in Torrelavega, Cantabria. There, Jorge, who is a pharmacist, and his brother Daniel, set up a small pharmacy store that worked well until the crisis of 2016. At that time, sales began to go down and the brothers thought they could open a digital window, Emulating other companies in the sector that were already doing it, as a cheap pharmacy, or even the same Amazon.
“We contacted a local agency that set up a store in Prestashop and then we manage it,” says Jorge. They were totally self -taught, learning to manage ADS campaigns in tutorials and moving forward in different areas. With this implementation, they made a comparison of income/expenses and saw that online was much more profitable than the physical business and that allowed them to be more competitive saving costs. However, the physical store always remained in the same place.
Three web migrations and much own development
What the infrastructure had to change. To start, the warehouse was small because online sales began to climb and, with them, the stock. The quarter of the pharmacy was no longer enough to keep the merchandise and had to move to a larger warehouse. That happened twice, until the industrial ship ended in which they are today, wide and high technological level, also in Cantabria. From there, they manage logistics, which includes own warehouse management. In fact, the speed in delivery is one of the business pillars, together with competitive prices.
As for the web, they began with an early version of Presta Shopwith the help of a local agency, but then maintenance and management was its own. With the growth of the business, they needed to migrate the store to another more advanced version of the platform, but last June they bet on Shopify, which offers more consistent benefits to what Farma2go needs today.
At the same time, they improved their mobile application -NAPS use, one of the tools we mentioned in Ecommtech. These two improvements promoted sales until reaching the same levels as in the best month of the pandemic, a golden age for the eCommerce.
The use of AI to climb the business
If something characterizes Jorge and Daniel is the claw that puts the business. They are a machine to learn and innovate and that shows in the verbiage of Jorge, which is always ready for proof and error: «We are a very small business and we will never be able to face the giants of this competitive sector. Therefore, we have to be efficient, ”he explains.
In that sense, the Application of artificial intelligence It has given them very good results andn two fundamental areas:
The creation of catalogs and product sheets. «At first it was very difficult to get supplier information. We have spent hours of loading information from PDF to complete information, ”recalls Jorge. Today, thanks to the AI application they can register up to 1,000 daily sheets, with a high level of detail. This work has earned them the silver medal in the category Best product sheet of the Ecommerce Awards 2024.
Jorge Peláez in the center of the photo
Customer Service: They work with Oct8ne chatbot, which allows them to give highly personalized attention, including product tracking, active promotions, etc. This has helped them improve customer service and to relieve work.
In addition, all aspects have worked hard SEO, sem and the Automation.
In that sense, Jorge emphasizes that both the incorporation of Francisco Cañadas To society- “the other brother Peláez,” Jorge jokes- as The commitment to Zahira Martín As Head of Digital of Farma2go were two inflection points in the business that have helped improve efficiency and transversality.
The problem of Marketplace and the challenge of social networks
Although they have tried to sell their products through different Marketplace, the General Regulations for the Safety of the Products of the European Union (GPSR) is too strict in the way in which the information, the images, the videos must be presented, which have made the company give up. «We will never be able to face the wishes of large companies and the big brands in their requests. What they asked us to sell in places like Amazon generated an effort far superior to the benefits that sales repossed. The legislation is too restrictive in the country, unlike other markets such as German, where for example, they can be prescribed medically online, ”explains Jorge.
Regarding social networks, he acknowledges that they have not penetrated enough: “I feel like an elephant in a pot,” he jokes. They have trouble finding the platforms, although they have plans to put more focus on the short term, especially in Tiktok, where they expect to create synergies with specific brands.
What is coming: a new vertical and affiliate marketing
“The strong pressure and variability of prices, and product margins make it very difficult to think about the medium and long term,” explains Jorge. That is why the company has always sought to be agile in its business decisions, knowing how to adapt quickly to any vicissitude.
But they do have some innovative plans in the short term: one is the incursion into affiliate marketing and others is the expansion of the pet food vertical. “The lookalike of our clients is very similar to the customer who has pets and takes care of his diet,” says Jorge.
However, by consulting him about the “Buyer Person,” he says that while the imaginary could define the pharmacy public as a woman between 40 and 65 years of age, there is nothing further from reality. «If we analyze our buyers, there are from children from 18 to ladies from 65, through medium -sized men and young women. It is very wide. Therefore, finding the Buyer person is not so simple ».
Therefore, including many different verticals helps the purchase baskets be varied and that the customer can find very different products in the same place. In that sense, Farma2go's goal will always be more variety and stock To be able to meet all the needs of a broad audience.
