Building a Top-200 Medicines Price & Availability Tracker Across India

The Client

A healthcare analytics company serving pharma brands and distributors across India. Their clients kept asking the same deceptively simple question: "What do India's top-selling medicines actually cost the consumer today, platform by platform, city by city — and are they in stock?" Every existing answer was a stale spreadsheet.

The Challenge

• Effective prices, not MRPs. Regulated MRPs are printed on the strip; what consumers pay is MRP minus platform discounts, membership pricing, and coupons — different on Tata 1mg, Netmeds, Apollo 24|7, and PharmEasy, and changing weekly. The client needed coupon-inclusive effective pricing, not list prices.
• Availability is hyper-local. The same medicine can be deliverable in one pincode and unavailable three kilometers away. National availability numbers were meaningless to distributors planning regional supply.
• Substitution visibility. When a branded medicine gaps out, platforms recommend alternatives — silently redirecting market share. Brands had zero visibility into which substitutes were being shown against their products.
• A moving Top-200. The tracked list itself needed quarterly refresh against sales-ranking data, with seasonal additions (monsoon OTC lines in July–September, respiratory lines in winter).
• Regulated-industry compliance. Pharma clients demanded documentation: public catalog data only, no patient or personal data anywhere near the pipeline.

The Actowiz Solution

1. Coverage architecture.

Daily extraction across four national epharmacies plus quick-commerce OTC listings (Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart), spanning a pincode panel covering metro, Tier-2, and Tier-3 cities — designed with the client to mirror their distributor footprint.

2. Effective-price engine.

For each SKU-platform pair, the pipeline captures MRP, listed price, applicable discount tiers, membership pricing, and live coupon applicability — computing the true consumer price per pincode, daily.

3. Availability & delivery-window tracking.

In-stock status and promised delivery windows per pincode, with stock-out events timestamped for duration analysis.

4. Substitution monitoring.

For every tracked SKU, the recommended-alternatives slots are extracted: which products, at what prices, triggered by stock-outs or displayed by default.

5. Alerting layer.

Same-day alerts on stock-out events for client-flagged brands, price moves beyond configurable thresholds, and new substitute appearances against tracked SKUs.

6. Compliance by construction.

Public catalog data only; no prescriptions, no patient data, no user accounts; PII masking at the edge as standard; full per-record lineage in the client's documentation pack.

The Outcome

The tracker became the client's flagship product module. Their pharma-brand customers used substitution visibility to quantify share loss during stock-outs for the first time — turning anecdote into a number that moved supply decisions. Distributor customers reallocated regional inventory against pincode-tier availability gaps, and the monsoon seasonal panel (ORS, antifungals, cold & flu lines) proved the highest-engagement feature of the year, feeding directly into our broader monsoon OTC demand research.

The engagement has since expanded to include ratings-and-review sentiment for OTC wellness lines and a competitor launch-detection feed for new SKU listings.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is "effective price" different from MRP tracking?

MRP is the regulated ceiling printed on the pack; effective price is what the consumer actually pays after platform discounts, membership pricing, and coupons — often 20–35% lower and different on every platform. Only effective pricing supports real competitive analysis.

Can availability really be tracked at pincode level?

Yes — deliverability checks per pincode are part of each extraction cycle, which is what reveals the metro/Tier-2/Tier-3 gaps that national numbers hide.

Does the pipeline touch any patient or personal data?

No. Collection covers public catalog, price, and availability data only — no prescriptions, accounts, or personal data — with PII masking at the edge as a standing control.

How fast can a similar tracker go live for our SKU list?

A pilot on your priority SKUs typically dashboards within 3–4 weeks, with the full panel and alerting layer following. Contact Actowiz Solutions to scope your list.