Risks of medical products e-supply: consumer perspective

Abstract

Despite advantages, Information and Communication technologies (ICT) development causes certain challenges for business entities, public organizations, and society. E-supply chain, as a phenomenon is not an exception. The needs and requirements of e-commerce logistics become one of most important drivers for logistics and physical distribution networks change. Over last decades this area changed dramatically. At the moment, with the growth of e-commerce, most of the shippers, especially multi-channel shippers, are just starting to develop their own distribution network infrastructure. Since year 2000 e-commerce started to expand rapidly with the „pure-play“ (online only) retailers, which enabled establishing of e-fulfillment distribution networks, the medical products e-commerce lack behind in terms of traditional e-commerce. Reason for this – specifics of product itself. First – huge part of medical products need recipes, and health care system (e-health) in country should be ready (like e-recipe). Such decisions in EU countries are quite new. For example, creation of e-health system for citizens in Lithuania started in 2005. First, it was such services as informational websites, and portals. Second stage of e-health system maturity involved e-services such as registration to doctor, e-patient card, data exchange between institutions. Last one – e-recipe implementation stage together with telemedicine possibilities, and these solutions lead to medicine products supply via electronic means (LR Valstybės kontrolė 2017). However, e-commerce of medical products brings new type of risks for producers, suppliers, medics and citizens. One of the biggest risks regarding fast information technologies development and possibilities to sell drugs worldwide is marketplace in dark net. Often this kind of risks are related more to cybercrime selling illicit drugs (Bachhuber and Cunningham 2013; Hodson 2013) than customer behavior prospective related issues. However, scientists also investigates aspects of medical products supply in darknet (Bancroft, Scott, and Reid 2016; Rhumorbarbe et al. 2016) - vendors focuses communication on quality aspects of the product, in order to remove the main doubts of the consumers. E-commerce itself, as complex phenomena, which consists of many different research areas, is analyzed widely. Such aspects as website quality (Davidavičienė 2011; Wang et al. 2016), website security (Manuputty, Noor, and Sumardi 2013; Saridakis et al. 2015; Xu, Wang, and Jia 2016), e-commerce customer behavior (Banytė, Tarutė, and Taujanskytė 2014; Dhir, Chen, and Nieminen 2015; Jackson, L.A.; Wang 2013; Moreira, Fortes, and Santiago 2017). Specifics of Lithuanian consumers were presented by (Davidaviciene, Pabedinskaite, and Davidavicius 2017; Davidavičienė 2011; Davidavičienė, Sabaitytė, and Davidavičius 2017; Sabaitytė and Davidavičius 2017).