Distance-selling pharmacies (DSPs), more commonly known as online pharmacies, have been steadily growing in number over the past couple of decades, since the first one — market leader Pharmacy2U — was established in 1999. A combination of the 2005 exemption, allowing online pharmacies to avoid market entry criteria, along with the more recent move from paper to electronic prescriptions, saw the number of DSPs reach 400 by the end of 2023 (see Figure 1). This increase in DSPs since 2016, when the NHS Business Services Authority first started to record them as such on its systems, is in contrast to a net loss of bricks-and-mortar pharmacies over the same period.
