64 Business View - November 2015
Vagenas admits that he and his partners were venturing
into unchartered territory by designing and building the
actual software and platforms specifically for the market-
place sector, but he is certain that it was a necessary
step to get his company to the next level. “We were new
to the business, so you have to get some traction going
to start getting ahead of the game,” he says. “You have to
spend money on technologies and marketing and differ-
ent aspects that you’re normally not knowledgeable on.
We did not know anything about the industry, but through
trial and error, and out of necessity, we created technol-
ogy that solved every issue that we had. And that’s what
we used to get us from not profitable to profitable.”
Vagenas explains that Pharmapacks’ proprietary pro-
cesses include tracking customer shopping patterns,
tracking items, tracking prices as they go up and down,
and adding different distributors that his company can
price shop from. “All of that was built into our software,
and we used that and created algorithms that can basi-
cally dictate sales for us as we plug and play our entire
catalogue into different marketplaces,” he says. In addi-
tion to Amazon and eBay, Pharmapacks is now the exclu-
sive seller on Wal-Mart for health and beauty products.
Vagenas sees no downside to piggy-backing onto the
most visited online, e-tail sites in the cybersphere. Armed
with the company’s catalogue of products, its technology,
and its warehouse managing processes, Pharmapacks
is often able to beat even its hosts’ best deals. “So when
you go on Wal-Mart’s site, if our price and our shipping
price is as good or better than Wal-Mart’s, they’ll let us
have the sale,” he says. “So when you go to buy what-
ever it is, if we sell that product, it will say ‘purchased
and packed from Pharmapacks.com.’ Wal-Mart puts our
name, prominently, on the transaction. It tells the con-
sumer that Pharmapacks.com is the actual retailer and
a trusted retailer of Wal-Mart.”
It seems that Vagenas and his partners have discovered
the fastest lane of the e-commerce highway. “E-com-
merce is growing at a rapid rate, so as years pass, there
LOGISTICS
