Consumer Purchasing Behavior for Herbal Medicine in Drugstore in Bangkok

Abstract

Most drug consumers in Thailand still buy herbal medicines from drugstores. If their purchasing behaviors or their decision making process are not appropriate, they would have problems of getting the herbal drugs with no quality and their safety would be at risk. The objective of this research was to study the consumers' behavior in purchasing herbal medicines and their attitudes toward herbal medicines in modern drugstores in Bangkok. The samples were drawn from herbal medicine consumers from 12 districts in Bangkok, with 5 drugstores randomly drawn from each district. Five subjects were purposively selected from the clients at each store by using a simple random sampling technique. The subjects were interviewed using a structured interview questionnaire. The findings revealed that 66% of the subjects purchased herbal medicines by the drug's names. In terms of frequency of the purchase, 56.3% purchased the medicine once in a while and purchased the medicine in composite or mixed forms rather than in single item forms. For the purpose of purchasing, 56% bought the herbal medicines to cure their own illness while 24.7% bought the herbal medicines for health prevention or to enhance their health. Before making decision to purchase, 93.3% of the subjects thought it was necessary to find information about the herbal medicines, and the most popular sources of information were from physicians, pharmacists, and nurses, and 83.3% thought it was necessary to read the labels first before purchasing. It was also found that products with complete labels, products with legal licensing, and good indications were the factors which  the  subjects  based  their  decision  on  the  purchase  of  the  herbal  medicines.  Furthermore, the subjects had positive attitudes toward herbal medicines, but were not certain in their effectiveness and quality.