How to check an online pharmacy in two minutes

Since 2015 every legal online pharmacy in the European Union must display a common EU logo on every page offering medicine. The logo is not a picture: it must be clickable and it must lead to that pharmacy's entry in its national register.

That last part is what matters. A copied image is trivial to add to a website; an entry in a government register is not. If clicking the logo does not open a register on a government domain with that pharmacy's name on it, the logo means nothing.

Do not follow the site's own link if you want certainty. Open the national register yourself and search for the pharmacy by name. In Germany that is the mail-order register held by the federal authority, in the United Kingdom the General Pharmaceutical Council register, and every EU country has its equivalent, listed by the European Commission.

A pharmacy that is registered will be there under a name and an address. One that is not will not, however many trust badges the site displays.

Does it require a prescription for a prescription medicine? A site willing to send you a prescription medicine after a single click has told you everything about itself.

Is there a named pharmacist or doctor, and a real registered address? Regulated services name the people responsible because they are required to.

Can a doctor say no? If the questionnaire has no path that ends in a refusal, it is not an assessment, it is a form.

Does the price look impossible? Generic medicine is genuinely cheap, and a price far under the pharmacy price of a generic is a signal about what is in the box, not about the deal you found.

The risk is not that a fake tablet does nothing. It is that nobody knows what is in it: the wrong dose of the right substance, a different substance entirely, or an active ingredient that interacts with something the buyer already takes. Since there was no consultation, nobody asked about the other thing they take.

This is the specific reason the medicines on this site are prescription-only. The prescription is not a bureaucratic obstacle between a person and a tablet. It is the step where somebody checks the combination.