Price Changes in Medicine and Healthcare During COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has changed everything. From mail-in voting to grocery deliveries, the pandemic is reshaping markets and industry like nothing we’ve seen before.

Consumer behavior has also changed across e-commerce platforms due to panic and frenzy caused by the virus. This has understandably led to a change in how sellers adjust prices as well. Since the pandemic is not yet over, it may be a bit early to see an exact industrywide effect from it. Some industries are reaping big benefits from the upsurge in sales and revenue, while others are suffering big losses. But almost all industries are already seeing changes in how retailers are pricing products.

GrowByData collected and analyzed the data of its clients and their competitors on Amazon.com and Google Shopping over the past five months to see whether changes in pricing correlate with consumer behavior. We found that the general trend across all markets indicates sellers are not making huge price adjustments to their products due to COVID-19, as you can see here:

Credit: GrowByData

Credit: GrowByData

However, when we look at the health and medical industry, we can clearly see the impact COVID-19 has already made.

Healthcare and Medical Industry

Besides necessities for survival, people need medical and health-related products more than ever in this climate. The healthcare and medical industry has seen that a large percentage of sellers have stopped lowering their prices while an equally large percentage of sellers have raised prices from previous months.

We found that on Amazon, the percentage of General Medicines sellers reducing their prices fell to an all-time low of 17 percent for March, which is far below their previous four-month average of 27 percent. In the same month, 40 percent of sellers increased prices, which is well above the previous four-month average of 26 percent.

Credit: GrowByData

We found a similar story on Google Shopping in March, when only 16 percent of sellers were reducing prices and 27 percent increased prices.

Credit: GrowByData

For specialized diabetic medical supplies sellers, we noted even more drastic changes in pricing for March, with only 8 percent of sellers lowering prices and 42 percent increasing prices on Amazon.

Credit: GrowByData

Similarly, in Google Shopping, 21 percent of sellers decreased prices, whereas 33 percent of sellers increased prices during the month of March.

Credit: GrowByData

In the current state of the world, demand for health and medical products is at an all-time high, and sellers are trying their best to make those products available to consumers. From the above data, it's also clear that most sellers are increasing their prices on these products rather than lowering them. It's crucial for retailers to take advantage of both consumer demand and the pricing trends of their competitors to maximize sales and revenue in these uncertain times.

Ramesh Karki is a junior business analyst and content writer and Pragyan Shrestha is the principal data analyst for competitive pricing intelligence at GrowByData, an enterprise retail data platform that offers retailers, manufacturers and advertising agencies competitive data for merchandising, advertising, pricing, channel management and corporate strategy.