Online Sales of Nutritional Supplements

My own shopping experience


Last December, before I went back to China for the winter break, I got a shopping list from friends. As a convention, they want me to buy all the items on the list and bring them back to China. On this 8 page shopping list, there are some nutritional supplements: Centrum Multivitamin/ Multimineral Supplement, Kirkland Glucosamine Chondroitin, Hyland's C-plus cold tablets, and Nature's Way Sambucus Original Syrup.

My first thought was to buy all the 4 items from CVS or Walgreens, because there are CVS and Walgreens shops in walking distance from where I live. However, it turned out that the task was not so easy to achieve. The 4 items are from different bands, for different functions and are placed on different shelfs. The most frustrating part was, I checked all shelfs in both CVS and Walgreens for a couple of times, but could not find Nature's Way Sambucus Original Syrup. When I finally found the rest 3 items, a few questions came to me: how do I know if there were cheaper sellers? Why don't I check prices on Amazon? I went home without buying any of them.


When I got home I visited the website of CVS and Walgreens and found out that Nature's Way Sambucus Original Syrup was out of stock in both stores. After a few online searching, I bought Centrum from Drugstore, and Kirkland Glucosamine Chondroitin and Hyland's C-plus cold tablets from Amazon. The two online stores offered free shipping for certain amount of purchase.


Pros and cons of online shopping


This shopping experience inspired me to look into the online sales of nutritional supplements. Comparing to traditional supplement retailers, online stores have their advantages. Firstly, search engine enalbes consumers to search product easily. My experience of searching all shefs in physical stores would not happen in the online stores. Secondly, customers can visit different websites at the same time to compare prices. Doing this in physical stores would cost huge amount of time and energy; but doing the same online is just a few mouse clicking. Thirdly, the shiping service saves customers trips, all customers need to do is to make payment with their credit cards and wait for their products to be delivered.
There are also a few obvious disadvantages for online shopping. First of all, customers must alow a few days for shipment. If a customer was in urgent need, he/she probably will go to physical store. Also, shipping fee could stop some customers fron buying online. Online retailers usually offer free shipping for a relatively bigger amount of purchase. Customers who need small amount may go to physical store.
Online supplement retailers and market trends

According to Packaged Facts, GNC and Vitamin Shoppe ranked as top 2 supplement specialty retailer in the United States. Other supplement specialty online retailers include Puritan's Pride, Drugstore,  Mysupplementstore, etc. In addition, the online retailer giant Amazon also attracts large amount of supplement consumers.

Supplement Trend Update

Datas show that the nutritional supplement industry is recession-resistant. It is among the few industries that are not affected by the downturn of the economy. A survey by Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) in 2009 shows that 65% percent of adults reported taking dietary supplements, and 73% of them said that the economy had not affected their supplement purchasing habits.


According to Packaged Facts’ May/June 2010 online consumer poll, 26% of supplement users have purchased vitamin, mineral, or supplement products online in the last 12 months. Packaged Facts also expects annual sales growth in nutritional supplements to increase over the new few years to reach $13.2 billion in 2014. Research from the Nutrition Business Journal shows an average of 7% increase per year between 1999-2008 for the combined nutrition industry direct-sales channels (including internet sales, catalog sales, TV-based sales, sales from multi-level marketers, and others). In 2010, online sales of supplements increased by 13% and reached $1.3 billion in sales. 







 Source: Nutritional Supplements in the U.S., 4th Edition, Packaged Facts (Septemter 2010).