A disrupting force, or ‘just another mail order pharmacy’? How Amazon Pharmacy stacks up a year after launching

It was the launch that sent pharmacy stocks into a tailspin.

Within hours of Amazon announcing it was starting Amazon Pharmacy last November, analysts began issuing warnings to investors in would-be rivals including CVS and Walgreens. “Today’s announcement is a net negative” for drugstores, one note from Evercore analysts read. “Retail Pharmacy is trading down big pre-market,” noted another, from Baird. But nearly a year after Amazon Pharmacy’s public debut — and three years after its purchase of specialty pharmacy startup PillPack — it remains unclear how Amazon will carve out its corner in an increasingly crowded market.

“Right now I don’t know if Amazon stacks up at all in the pharmacy space, to be blunt,” said Antonio Ciaccia, chief executive officer of the nonprofit pharmacy research organization 46brooklyn. “But they’re Amazon. To count them out would be a fool’s errand.”

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