When you buy online meds you get the whole range of advantages ensured by online drug stores. First of all, it is very simple and convenient. You just visit the website of a drug store, choose the meds you need and click on it to buy it. You place your order, and as soon as it is possible your medicine will come to you!

But the main advantage of online meds stores is the privacy of all orders which make customers. Potential customer don’t worry about anybody being in the store at the same time and seeing what meds or prescription products he is purchasing. Also the privacy that an online meds store suggest allows you to avoid that possibility by having the products delivered discreetly to your home.

More and more consumers are using the Internet for health reasons. According to the market research firm Cyber Dialogue Inc., health concerns are the sixth most common reason people go online. Internet drugstores, however, won't make "brick and mortar" pharmacies obsolete anytime soon. Over 3 billion prescriptions were dispensed in 2000, and though no reliable figures gauging total online sales are yet available, industry sources say that number is likely still fairly small.

The scene is becoming increasingly common in the United States: Consumers are replacing a trip to the corner drugstore with a click onto the Internet, where they find hundreds of Web sites selling prescription drugs and other health products.

Many of these are lawful enterprises that genuinely offer convenience, privacy, and the safeguards of traditional procedures for prescribing drugs. For the most part, consumers can use these services with the same confidence they have in their neighborhood pharmacist. In fact, while some are familiar large drugstore chains, many of these legitimate businesses are local "mom and pop" pharmacies, set up to serve their customers electronically.

For some people, buying prescription drugs online offers advantages compared to purchasing drugs from a local drugstore, including:

• the privacy and convenience of ordering medications from their homes
• greater availability of drugs for shut-in people or those who live far from the pharmacy
• the ease of comparative shopping among many sites to find the best prices
• greater convenience and variety of products
• easier access to written product information and references to other sources than in traditional storefront pharmacies

Internet drug shopping is said to save consumers money. In some cases this is true. A survey in the fall of 1999 by Consumer Reports showed that buyers could save as much as 29 percent by obtaining certain drugs online. But another study, conducted in 1999 by the University of Pennsylvania and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, tracked Internet sales of Viagra and Propecia and found that the two drugs were an average of 10 percent more expensive online than at local Philadelphia-area pharmacies.

In another part of that study, researchers Bernard Bloom, Ph.D., and Ronald Iannocone found that 37 of the 46 sites they examined either required a prescription from a personal physician, or offered to prescribe a medication based solely on a questionnaire. But nine sites, all based outside the United States, did not require a prescription. The researchers also found that even when Web sites offered a questionnaire with the promise that a physician would review the form, nothing was generally known about the doctor's qualifications, and it was easy for users to provide false information to obtain a prescription.

Some feel new laws will be needed to improve this situation. Whether new legislation will improve oversight of online pharmacies remains to be seen. For the moment, regulators have entered what the FDA's Shuren calls "a whole new ball game" that cuts across the limited jurisdictions of several federal and state agencies.

The principal reason for the reduced price of generic medicines is that the creation of the generic drug runs up less cost and therefore a lower price can be offered and still maintain profitability.
Manufacturers of generic drugs are mainly able to avoid the following three costs that brand name pharmaceutical companies incur:
(1) costs associated with the research and development of the drug;
(2) costs associated obtaining regulatory approval (i.e. proving safety and efficacy of a drug); and
(3) marketing costs
First, Generic manufacturers do not incur the cost of drug discovery and instead reverse-engineer existing brand name drugs to allow them to manufacture bioequivalent versions.
Second, generic manufacturers do not bear the burden of proving the safety and efficacy of the drugs through clinical trials - rather, generic manufacturers must prove the generic drug’s bioequivalancy to the existing drug.
Third, these companies receive the large benefit of the marketing and advertising that goes into pushing the innovator drug. The brand name drug has to prove itself in the eyes of the consumer, generic ones do not. The drugs that generic manufacturers are selling have been on the market for usually a decade or more and do not need additional advertising. For the same reason, generic manufacturers also do not give away sample doses to promote their products. The significant research, development and marketing costs incurred by the large pharmaceutical companies in introducing a new drug to the market is often cited as the reason for the high cost of new agents - they wish to recover these costs before the patent expires. Generic manufacturers do not incur these costs, with bioequivalence testing and manufacturing costing relatively little, and are able to charge significantly less than the brand.