Margin and selling price in a pharmacy: the Morocco guide

Margin is the difference between what you pay for a product and what you sell it for. Simple on paper, but a pharmacy has two worlds: the medicine, whose retail price is often fixed, and parapharmacy, where you're free.

People often confuse margin and markup. Markup multiplies the cost price to get the selling price. Margin is read as a percentage of the selling price. The same product can show a 'nice' markup and a real margin lower than you'd think once costs are deducted.

For reimbursable medicine, the retail price is capped: your margin is largely set in advance. You don't play on price, you play on volume, rotation and controlling expiries.

For parapharmacy, supplements, cosmetics and equipment, you set prices freely. That's where a good part of your profitability is built, as long as you don't apply the same markup to everything without thinking.

• Forgetting supplier discounts: your real cost price is often lower than the listed one, so your real margin is higher.
• Never revising parapharmacy prices: costs move, your prices stay frozen for months.
• Ignoring expiries: a product thrown out at zero wipes out the margin of several others.
• Thinking in markup without looking at net margin once costs are included.

Doing all this by hand, product by product, is unsustainable. POS and management software knows your real cost price, applies your margin rules per family and instantly shows the margin on each sale. You immediately spot products sold at a loss.

PharmaVexa calculates margin on every sale and per product, distinguishes the weighted cost of different batches, and alerts you when a price drops below your threshold. To see pricing and what's included, check our pricing page.