OCU study of personal care products in pharmacies and parapharmacies

Madrid, August 5, 2014.

OCU has made a comparative study of the prices of personal care products sold in pharmacies and parapharmacies. The main aim was to see the price difference between these two channels.
To do this, we looked at the prices of the bestselling products in our country within the oral hygiene and dermocosmetic market segments.

The sample consisted of 3,500 pharmacies and 1,400 parapharmacies. And after studying the data, OCU has shown that there are differences in the price of the same products depending on where they are acquired, a difference that results in average savings of 66% in the case of pharmacies. The study is published in the August edition of OCU Salud, the OCU health magazine.
The buying of cosmetics is mainly done in supermarkets, which is known as the FMCG market, but there are also a large number of people who prefer to buy branded products that are sold in pharmacies or parapharmacies. These are brands that choose these outlets for positioning and because traditionally pharmacies are associated with better guarantees of quality and advice.

OCU points out that only medicines and other price subsidised products have a fixed price and can be sold only in pharmacies.
Although when it comes to cosmetics, the standards and guarantees are the same for everyone, regardless of point of sale.

The conclusion of the OCU study is that in pharmacies maximum and minimum price differences for the same product may be very large, in some products reaching 77% (eg, denture adhesives), with average savings between the different products analysed of 66%. This leads to the conclusion that in pharmacies you can find both maximum and minimum prices, so if you are a regular user of a particular product our advice is to check out several pharmacies before you buy.
On the other hand, when average pharmacy prices (rather than prices at the extremes of the price range) are considered, these are more or less the same as the parapharmacies, though the latter are an average of 6% cheaper for the same product.
For more information (media) Eva Jimenez Tel:   917 226 061
prensa@ocu.org