When it comes to purchasing just about anything, you’re almost always able to find a better price online that you’d be able to find on the same product in a local store or from a big retailer. A large part of this reason is that online resellers aren’t having to carry and pay for the overhead cost of having a storefront. By leasing warehouse space rather than storefront or commercial real estate space, stores and their owners are potentially saving half of their monthly rent/lease payment. Online resellers typically don’t operate from a storefront or commercial space, they are typically operating from smaller warehouse spaces, thus they are saving large amounts of money on their rental and/or lease payments, and they are in-turn able to pass some of these savings onto their customers by offering the same products as large retailers at lower prices.

Your veterinarian may be able to match some online prices (if they sell the product that you’re looking for). Typically, veterinarians are going to sell items at full retail price, so if you find a lower price online and print it out and take it in, some vets might be willing to match the price in order not to miss out on the sale. It’s basically going to come down to their bottom line. Your vet might not sell large quantities (like an online retailer may), so they might not have the buying power of a large online retailer, meaning that a large online retailer gets product at 50% off, and the smaller local vet may only get product at 30% off. So in the example below, the vet wouldn’t even be able to offer the same price because they’d be losing money by making the sale.

For example, lets look at Frontline Plus flea and tick medicine for dogs – we’ll look at the 3 pack for dogs that are 45-88 pounds.

• $51.99 – Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price
• $33.99 – Frontline Plus at Amazon (3 pack)

Here’s the same pricing info for the 6 pack:

• $99.99 – Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price
• $65.99 -Frontline Plus at Amazon (6 pack)

Amazon offers the 6 pack of Frontline Plus at an approximate 35% discount.

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• Save Money by Ordering Pet Medications Online for a Dog Knee Injury
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One of the most difficult things we faced with our dogs knee injury was that cost. Obviously, the cost of surgery was a huge burden, especially due to the fact that it came at a time that was unexpected, as most torn CCL’s and other knee injuries do. After the initial cost of surgery, we thorugh we were in the clear, but we hadn’t even taken into account the cost of medications after the surgery. Buying all of the pills and medicines for our dog directly from our veterinarian became very pricy. After doing a little research online, we found that there were plenty of online stores that offered the same medications at a fraction of the cost of what we were paying our veterinarian for the same medicine. This realy was a no-brainer for us – we needed to save money, so we decided that we’d start ordering the medications online.

Come to find out, pet medications are treated as controlled substances (just as drugs and medications are treated for you and I) – you need a prescription in order to place an order for pet medicines online. Now this is a slippery slope, and I’ll address this issue in a later blog post (How do you tell your vet that you want to buy your medications from another source). If you want to order your pet medications online, you’ll need to ask your veterinarian for a prescription, and as I mentioned before, that could put you in a tough place because the veterinarian obviously just performed a huge surgery on your pet then you (in a way) tell them that you want to go elsewhere.  There is a way to keep both parties happy, you’ll just need to use some creative thinking. I’ll explore that a little bit more in a later post.

Image by Darren Hester.

Related Posts

• Save Money On Pet Medications by Asking Your Veterinarian to Match an Online Price
• Cost of Repairing a Torn ACL/CCL Injury in a Dogs Knee
• Diagnosing a Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CCL) Injury