Introduction
Beyond grocery stores and pharmacy stores, there is a new concept of vitamin stores. If you have a health-related complaint, you can walk into a vitamin store instead of a pharmacy store. You will find many products perfectly matching your health needs. These products are referred to as health supplements, or sometimes vitamins, dietary supplements or nutritional supplements. Health supplements are available in a range of variety to resolve physical or mental problems.
Buying health products
For average consumers not literate about health products, these supplements are like essential nutrients of life, but they are unaware of the consequences from the use of these products. They can’t weigh their benefits and risks from the attractive and informative label that enhance aesthetic of the store shelves.
Buying of health supplements
Let’s move to vending of health supplements. These supplements are launched for sale in two different ways; these supplements are either sold through offline pharmacy or vitamin
Pros of online supplement buying
On the positive side, online supplement buying offers a major benefits of convenient home shopping, cashless payment, and easy door shipping. People having no time to visit a market store prefer this way of buying supplements, but they never look on the negative side of this buying.
There’s more to consider cons
The benefits seen in the positive aspect of supplement buying are very convincing and cloud the negative side of this buying. There is more to look at the negative or dark side on online supplement buying. Online buying is always tricky because the vendors are not known and products have no physical access until receipt of shipment. Thus, reliability of both vendor and product is not accredited.
Important factor on the negative side
Another important factor to consider about health supplements is that these are health products, but sell in the unregulated markets. The approval is not required for these products from health authorities or drug approval agencies. Thus, the products may or may not be tested for their genuineness and functionality. You also don’t need a doctor’s prescription to buy these products.
Offline vs online buying
However, there is a safety to a certain extent when you buy some supplement from an offline pharmacy store or vitamin shop where the vendor has physical selling location, qualified staff, facility to check and read label before buying, and to check the original seal on the bottle before buying. This offers better guarantee of genuineness compared to online buying.
Online buying is tricky
In general, far more incidents of fake supplement selling are reported compared to selling through offline markets. There’s a general tendency of vendors playing tricks when consumers have no physical access to some product. This carries a great risk when you are buying a health product such as medication, supplement or medical device online.
Conclusion
Online buying of supplements is recommended due to lot of convenience, but if you can trust online platform for this purchase, else your online buying has no worth.
