Cash was the most common way to buy weed before COVID hit. Then everything changed, stores closed, and we all went from no one wanting to shop online for weed to having no choice but to shop online. Dispensaries were not technically capable of seamlessly merging retail and E-commerce sales because of industry-specific issues like compliance and inventory. 

Today we meet Jeremy Johnson from Dispense, a B2B software company working to ease the sale process friction for dispensaries. We talk about SEO and how the industry is ready to use brand strains and product names to increase SEO website traffic, not “dispensary near me.” 

Please give us an overview of Dispense and what it does.

Dispense is an e-commerce platform built for cannabis retailers or dispensaries, it’s not a marketplace where consumers can come to buy cannabis, we power the online shopping experience for cannabis retailers and live in the background to make it easy for retailers to sell weed online.

Can you elaborate on how you power E-commerce businesses?

We power dispensaries through menu integrations with a POS provider like Leaf Logix, Flowhub, Cova, or BLAZE. We take all the inventory information to display on your online menu and sync it up with curbside pickup, in-store pickup, and delivery orders.

So basically, we are the menu that powers a cannabis retailer’s entire menu system. 

Dispensary websites are much more complicated than other industries and constantly changing because of product drops and new product additions. Is the information pulled from the POS system to update the inventory? 

Correct, cannabis is quite a bit more complicated than your standard retail operation. In Michigan, where I live, the average retailer has something like 2,000 SKUs in their inventory, and it’s constantly changing. Sales volume tends to be high in dispensaries which means frequent inventory turnover.

And you also have to be fully compliant by using a reporting system like Metrc for compliance and reporting. 

We take the inventory data in your POS to update it with what is sold in-store or online and communicate with the POS system all the compliance details with Metric or whatever state tracking system you use. It is far more complicated than your standard retail operation, and that’s why you don’t see the E-commerce software players in the space and why there are dedicated cannabis E-commerce software like ours.

What is the difference between Dispense and its competitors like Dutchie or Jane?

When you’re using a Dutchie or a Jane, the most significant difference is that they are marketplaces, and you don’t always have access to or control over your data. They can leverage your data in ways you might not want them to, and we see it happening in other industries besides cannabis through lawsuits against DoorDash and Grubhub. Retailers like Amazon are known for taking products that sell well on their platform, knocking them off, and essentially listing those products above independent retailers. So people just need to be weary when working with marketplaces.

You said that most cannabis websites are not fully optimized for search engines because the E-commerce software isn’t as robust as in other industries. What are we missing that others are not?

Most dispensary menus right now are powered by iframes, and iframes is a technology invented in about 1996. No other industry is using them to power their online stores at this point, and if they are, they’re behind also. 

Iframes are great for certain things like showing content from one website inside of another website, but they lack in many things like security, customization, and optimization. 

Iframes do not act like individual unique pages making it hard for Google to follow the customer journey. By having a true native menu on your website, they can follow that journey from page to page, and you can get deeper analytics to understand how your consumer is shopping. 

It starts with your website’s menu technology, and if you don’t build a house with a strong foundation, you will have problems when you add to that foundation. It boils down to having a good foundation and a fully integrated menu on your website.

To be clear, our competitors offer a native menu solution, but it’s through THEIR API, making it a lot of work for the retailer to build out a custom solution, whereas Dispense’s solution works out of the box.

Why is the cannabis industry “forced” to use the iFrame technology for E-commerce software?

The Dutchie and Jane technologies were the first to emerge in the industry when they were founded around 2018 when cannabis e-commerce was not a big deal, and dispensaries weren’t quite selling online because there wasn’t a big focus on it. The platforms were built with iframes as MVPs (minimum viable products) because they’re quick and easy to get up and operate.

Companies got stuck with the iframes because that was available at the time. 

You’ve spoken about product data as an SEO strategy at the recent Cannabis Marketing Summit in Denver. Can you explain a bit about what you mean?

If you’re looking to purchase cannabis, you will most likely search – “Dispensary near me,” it’s the most used keyword that dispensaries fight for, but if you look at a mature industry, people are searching for specific items like- ” carpenter’s hammer.” I doubt I would Google where’s the closest hardware store or hammer store.

The most search volume is still around things like “dispensary near me.” But every day, more and more people are becoming brand loyal or strain loyal, and they want specific products. Some brands emerging in the cannabis space have 30 to 50,000+ searches every month that are missing a lot of opportunities on the revenue side to optimize for brands, strains, and products. 

And that’s why product data from a native menu (not iframe) can come in real handy on the SEO side.

What if another dispensary in the area sells products you are trying to rank for? How do you compete?

If you’re using an iframe, your dispensary will not show in those search results because Google’s not associating that product information someone is searching with your website.

If two dispensaries rank together within the first few results, Google will look at other factors; You may have a perfectly optimized SEO menu, killing it with your structured data and schema, but you’ve got one review on Google. Guess what? The store with 50 reviews wins. There’s a whole ecosystem out there, and product data is just one part of SEO,.

There are many software options with different specialties, and it sounds like there needs to be some consolidation in the industry to combine the benefits and costs.

I would say it’s happening. Dutchie just purchased two different POS systems, Leaf Logix and Green Bits, and can theoretically offer a more comprehensive solution to customers. BLAZE scooped up another POS in Canada, and Weedmaps bought Sprout and Enlighten. The field is starting to reveal itself, but we still have a long way to go for sure

Article by Pam Chmiel,

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Studio 420 is a cannabis and psychedelics creative agency specializing in branding, UX/UI design, web development, ecommerce, and digital marketing solutions. We offer a variety of services to ELEVATE your online web presence.

Contact our Denver, Colorado office for a no-obligation, project cost analysis at 303-653-9855.