Turning a marketplace restriction into a new revenue engine.
Your Discount Chemist is an established pharmacy business operating in a highly regulated environment.
When it came to expanding on marketplaces, the rules were clear: certain health and pharmacy-related product ranges required additional approvals, came with compliance restrictions, or were blocked from key categories entirely.
A typical retailer could simply list and scale. Your Discount Chemist couldn’t, through its existing pharmacy account structure. Rather than accepting that as a ceiling, the business identified an opportunity: with Omnivore, they built a standalone marketplace strategy, purpose-built for high-demand categories outside the pharmacy restrictions — and it outperformed the original account.
The Challenge
Operating as a pharmacy business means operating within significant regulatory constraints, and marketplaces reflect that.
Many categories required additional approvals or documentation; others were restricted or excluded altogether for pharmacy-linked sellers. The result was a ceiling on what could be listed, where, and how — a challenge a typical retailer doesn’t face.
For Your Discount Chemist, this meant scaling marketplace revenue the conventional way wasn’t an option. Simply expanding the existing account wouldn’t work, and given the compliance obligations tied to the core pharmacy business, protecting that integrity wasn’t negotiable.
The Opportunity
The goal was to build a meaningful revenue stream that could run alongside the pharmacy business without being constrained by it.
The team identified marketplace categories with strong consumer demand, healthy margins, and fewer regulatory barriers. Fragrance was the obvious starting point being highly searched, brand-driven, and a proven performer in marketplace environments. With the right infrastructure, it could be scaled quickly.
Rather than fighting the restrictions, the strategy worked around them by creating a dedicated, standalone marketplace operation focused entirely on the categories where growth was possible.
What looked like a limitation became the parameter for the brief.
The Risk
The question wasn’t whether the opportunity existed, it was whether it could be executed smoothly.
Building a separate marketplace operation meant managing inventory, pricing, fulfilment and customer service across multiple storefronts, simultaneously, and without adding significant manual load to the team.
Brand reputation was also at stake. Any new storefront carrying the Your Discount Chemist standard needed to deliver the same customer experience customers expected there was no room for a lower-grade operation running in parallel.
A new marketplace strategy requires investment before it generates return, You Discount Chemist needed confidence it would gain traction quickly enough to justify the build.
The Omnivore Approach
Omnivore provided the infrastructure to stand up separate marketplace storefronts.
The Omnivore platform enabled full separation of product ranges, inventory, pricing and marketplace operations across storefronts, while maintaining centralised control from a single environment. That meant the team could manage multiple marketplace businesses without having to manage multiple manual processes to go with them.
Customisable rules at an individual marketplace level gave the business the flexibility to respond to each channel’s requirements, without creating exceptions that had to be handled manually or inconsistently. Without that level of automation and integration, the operational overhead alone would have made the model unviable.
The Outcome
The results exceeded expectations
Performance surpassed the original pharmacy-linked marketplace account quicker than projected.
What began as a workaround became the stronger growth channel. The marketplace channel contributed an additional 15% to overall marketplace revenue within the first 6 months, a figure the team had not anticipated achieving this quickly. Operationally, the team was able to scale across multiple marketplace storefronts without a corresponding increase in manual workload. Omnivore’s centralised control meant visibility stayed high even as the operation expanded.
What This Means
For businesses operating within regulated environments, marketplace restrictions are often treated as fixed constraints. Your Discount Chemist’s experience shows they don’t have to be. With the right infrastructure and a deliberate strategy, it’s possible to build a parallel marketplace operation, one that sits cleanly alongside the core business, complies with the rules, and grows independently of them.
The model has opened new product categories, reduced reliance on a single marketplace structure, and created a more resilient ecommerce operation overall. Automation has absorbed the operational complexity that would otherwise have made it unmanageable.
What initially appeared to be a restriction ultimately drove 15% in additional revenue contributed by the new marketplace channel within 6 months.
The results exceeded our expectations. What began as a solution to marketplace limitations evolved into a stronger and more scalable growth channel for the business. Omnivore gave us the ability to customise rules at an individual marketplace level — that control and flexibility was what allowed us to scale and expand rapidly.
Hamdy Khodary
Head of E-Commerce, Your Discount Chemist