Q-commerce promised what e-pharmacies couldn’t, but can it actually deliver?

For Kaushal Shah, this past Valentine’s Day was four years in the making. Shah, the founder and CEO of EVitalRx, has been quietly building towards doing what India’s e-pharmacies have struggled to do for the past decade—delivering medicines in mere minutes. 

“If no one else will do it, we will,” Shah remarked on a chilly January afternoon in Delhi. Fast forward to 14 February. PillO—a new pharma e-commerce app—went live, promising 60-minute medicine deliveries. The Ahmedabad-based platform will soon launch in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad as well.

Unlike e-pharmacies, which rely on warehouses and inventory-led models, PillO leverages EVitalRx’s network of over 7,000 retail pharmacies, effectively sidestepping the regulatory hurdles that have seen e-pharmacies stumble in their efforts to disrupt the offline pharma space. 

For context, despite billions of dollars being poured into the e-pharma space, e-pharmacies have failed to gain substantial traction in India. The Rs 2,40,000 crore retail pharmacy market remains largely dominated by unorganised players (85%), with online penetration restricted to a mere 3-5%, far behind the 22-25% seen in developed markets, according to a December 2024 report from CRISIL.