“Free to join” is doing a lot of work in most pitches to pharmacies. The cost of selling online is rarely a single number, and the parts nobody quotes — staff time, delivery, the money you cannot touch for three weeks — usually matter more than the headline rate. Here is the whole shape of it.
The five costs
1. Setup
Building your own storefront costs real money once and real attention forever. Joining an existing platform usually costs nothing up front. The question worth asking is not what setup costs but what it commits you to: money spent on a build is gone whether or not the orders come.
2. Payment processing
Every naira a customer pays you online passes through a payment processor, and processors charge a percentage — commonly around 1.5% on local card and transfer payments, usually with a cap so large orders are not punished. This cost exists on every route. If a platform tells you there is no payment fee, it is inside another number.
3. Commission
Only applies if you join a network, and it is the cost people focus on because it is the one stated as a percentage. Judge it against what it replaces: if the platform brings you a customer you would not otherwise have served, the comparison is not “commission versus zero”, it is “commission versus no sale”.
4. Delivery
The cost that most often turns a profitable order into a loss. Dispatch in Nigerian cities is priced per trip, and a single trip can exceed the margin on a small order outright. Pickup avoids it entirely — which is why it is worth keeping as an option rather than treating delivery as the default.
5. Staff time
Never quoted, always paid. Every online order costs someone attention: reading it, checking stock, picking, packing, answering a question about substitution. At low volume this hides inside the working day. At higher volume it becomes a person's job, and the channel that looked cheapest can turn out to be the most expensive — WhatsApp especially, because every order is a conversation held from memory.
The cost nobody counts: when you get paid
Settlement timing is not a fee, but it behaves like one. Money you have earned and cannot yet spend is working capital you have to find elsewhere, and for a pharmacy restocking weekly that is the difference between a channel that funds itself and one you subsidise. Ask any platform when funds actually land — not when the order is marked complete.
Worked examples
These use FillPrescript's published rates: a 3% service fee (minimum ₦100, capped at ₦1,500) plus 1.5% payment processing with 7.5% VAT on that processing fee. Everything is deducted before payout, so the net column is what actually reaches your account.
| Order | Service fee | Processing | Total | You net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ₦3,000 | ₦100 | ₦48 | ₦148 (4.9%) | ₦2,852 |
| ₦10,000 | ₦300 | ₦161 | ₦461 (4.6%) | ₦9,539 |
| ₦25,000 | ₦750 | ₦403 | ₦1,153 (4.6%) | ₦23,847 |
| ₦50,000 | ₦1,500 | ₦806 | ₦2,306 (4.6%) | ₦47,694 |
| ₦100,000 | ₦1,500 | ₦1,613 | ₦3,113 (3.1%) | ₦96,888 |
Two things are worth reading off that table. The effective rate is flat at about 4.6% through the middle of the range — and it falls above ₦50,000, because the service fee is capped at ₦1,500 however large the order gets. And on a very small order the ₦100 minimum dominates, which is why a ₦3,000 basket costs proportionally more than a ₦25,000 one.
You can run your own numbers on the pricing page calculator.
How to compare two options honestly
Work out what you keep on a realistic order, not on a percentage. Take your actual average basket, subtract every cost on both routes — including delivery and an honest estimate of staff time — and compare the two net figures. Then ask the question the arithmetic cannot answer: how many of these orders would have happened anyway?
A commission on a sale you were always going to make is pure cost. The same commission on a customer who found you through the platform is the price of a customer, and that is a different calculation entirely — one most pharmacies get wrong by treating every online order as if it were already theirs.