Drugstore.com

» see drugstore.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

drugstore.com was incorporated in 1998 in bellevue, washington, by jed smith and dave whorton. peter neupert came in from microsoft as the founding ceo. amazon announced a minority investment on february 24, 1999, and jeff bezos took a board seat. the pitch was the same pitch every 1999 e-commerce company was running. you would order shampoo and aspirin from a warehouse instead of walking to the corner pharmacy.

the company ipoed on nasdaq in july 1999 with a market cap around $600 million. unlike pets.com or kozmo.com, drugstore.com survived the bust. revenue kept climbing. profitability did not arrive on schedule, but the company stayed in business while every other 1999 e-tailer collapsed during 2000 and 2001. the warehouse-and-shipping model mostly worked when the catalog was high-margin healthcare products instead of pet food.

walgreens bought the company on march 24, 2011 for $409 million, mostly to acquire the customer list and the beauty.com sub-brand. for a few years drugstore.com kept operating as a separate site. by 2016 walgreens decided two pharmacy websites was one too many. the drugstore.com domain was switched off on september 30, 2016, and after that any visitor was redirected to walgreens.com forever.

drugstore.com never shipped to turkey. in 1999 i was 15 with a 33.6k modem at home and the eczane was downstairs anyway. i learned about drugstore.com years later, when i started reading dot-com survivor stories and noticed it was the rare 1999 e-commerce brand that did not die on time. the actual ending turned out to be quieter than the loud ones. walgreens bought it, ran it for five years, then folded it into the parent because it served no purpose the parent did not already serve.

~ the record ~

~ killed by ~

duplication. walgreens.com already existed and already sold the same products. running two websites with the same parent and the same catalog was an accounting redundancy waiting to be cut. once internal pressure built up, drugstore.com was the version that got switched off. the brand had been bought for the customer list, and after five years of integration there was nothing left in the brand worth keeping alive.

~ what they sold ~

the catalog was personal healthcare basics like aspirin and shampoo, plus eventual prescription refills through a mail-order pharmacy partnership. beauty.com launched as a sub-site for higher-margin cosmetics. the actual differentiator was that you could order embarrassing things like wart cream or hair-loss treatments without making eye contact with a pharmacist.

~ what came after ~

amazon. by 2010 amazon was selling everything drugstore.com sold and shipping it faster. walgreens kept the physical pharmacy moat going while letting the online experiment quietly run down. a decade later cvs and walmart figured out their own online pharmacies, and prescription delivery became table stakes. drugstore.com was an early bet that the entire category would move online. that bet was right. it just took twenty years to play out, and by then nobody needed a separate brand to mark the migration.

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