Completely free to use
PharmacyReviewer.co is completely free to use.
When it was first started, in February 2007, it was just a one-man operation. It was set up because the (current) owner needed to buy some medicines online and found that he could not verify how reliable the online pharmacies out there were. Since then it has grown to a very active site, with thousands of visitors every day.
So how does it generate revenue?
With all the traffic has come large running costs which we need to cover.
The pharmacies which we recommend in the top-rated list are there because they have a good record of delivering quality products at a low price. No genuine user reviews are ever censored, even if they are negative about pharmacies in the top-rated list. We regularly review the list of top-rated pharmacies to try to balance the editor’s reviews with the user-submitted reviews. Amongst the top-rated pharmacies are some which we link to through “affiliate links” which generate revenue for this site. Those pharmacies which are linked to by affiliate links are clearly marked with an * by their names. The affiliate links work the same way as normal links, but if someone clicks through the link is tracked and it may generate a payment to the site (the details vary; sometimes per click, sometimes only if that person buys something from the pharmacy). For many of the pharmacies in the top-rated list and in the price comparison tables we do not make any money at all by linking to them. We do not make any money from sales of controlled medicines.
Doesn’t this compromise the site?
No. The reviews and price comparison table are kept honest at all times. If a site gets bad reviews we stop recommending them, even if they offer us money. This has happened dozens of times in the past. In this industry sites which are reliable one week will sometimes all-of-a-sudden turn bad almost overnight so we have to be on top of things and move pharmacies into our blacklisted section if appropriate. We know this site will only survive long-term if the reviews are always honest.
Will I pay more if I click an affiliate link?
No. Never. The price you pay at the online pharmacy is never more because you came through our links, it can however be less. As can be seen from the results of our price comparison tool, the pharmacies which pay us an affiliate referral fee often have the cheapest prices, because they pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. Moreoever for some of those pharmacies, people clicking through from this site benefit from a coupon discount code which means you will pay less. There is one other advantage to visiting pharmacies through this site: the pharmacies want to keep customers that use PharmacyReviewer.co especially happy in the hope that they might spread the word about their good experiences. The affiliate referral fee we get varies but is considerably less than is sometimes advertised on a lot of pharmacies’ “affiliate” pages, because they set a % commission based on what they say is the “wholesale price” which is always a lot less than the price on the website.
What happens to the money?
A lot of the revenue is used to pay the costs of hiring a specially-protected server which keeps this site running all the time despite the attempts of rogue online pharmacies in our blacklisted section to attack us through “distributed denial of service” attacks and other means. This special website hosting service is much more expensive than normal non-protected hosting, but we would rather keep the blacklist published and pay the extra. All four forum moderators and the two part-time staff who answer emails are paid a small salary. Because the moderators are all paid the same regardless of what is said on the forum, or in the reviews section, about any online pharmacy, the forum is kept honest (plus the moderators are honest people anyway!) There is also the substantial cost of developing and maintaining the website, including the price comparison tool and all the special features of the forum.