📺 Change the channel...

Let’s say you had a small retail business. A retail business that sells pants. We’ll call it Pants Town. 👖

You have a quaint storefront, and you have great pants. You get healthy foot traffic from the town you’re in. Now, it’s time to optimize your digital presence so that more people can find out about, explore, and purchase your best-in-class pants.

What do you do?

💡 Fun fact: Pants Town was a real store in my hometown. They sold pants. I bought Lee Pipes and JNCO’s and Dickies there. The late 90s and early 2000s were a cool time. 

🥇 First and foremost, a website

The very first to-do is to create your website, designed to be true to your brand and engineered to support efficient shopping. You’ll highlight your brand, and you’ll highlight the pants you want to sell. You’ll make it an efficient, pleasant shopping experience for your potential digital customers. You’ll offer various forms of fulfillment - maybe you offer delivery, and surely you offer in-store pickup.

You’ll optimize the structure and content of your site so that search engines prioritize your digital storefront when someone types “great pants near me.”

You’ll look at KPIs like site visits, average order value, and conversion rate.

^All of that comes first.

🥈 Second, platforms

Secondly, you’ll want to increase the amount of people visiting your site, so you can really leverage your great conversion rates. Your SEO is toight, so you are receiving a healthy amount of organic traffic. But how can you get more?

Well, you’ll have to ensure that your business is find-able on platforms where people are trying to find things.

That means, primarily, and for the business of pants:

• Google My Business

  • Google handles 90% of search traffic, and maintains an extremely sophisticated listing service for businesses. Your business must be listed, and with appropriate context clues (location, type of business, photos, hours, etc.), to capture the attention of potential shoppers. This’ll also make you find-able on Google Maps

  • Also, Google Shopping enables eCommerce for your products; meaning, customers can order pants directly from Google’s interface, and the order will be sent to you. Solid

• Yelp

  • Social proof is massively important; we know that verified product reviews increase conversion rates by 3x, and Yelp is built on a mountain of verified reviews

  • A retail listing on Yelp enables access to the 156 million monthly visitors, drastically increasing the amount of people that know about Pants Town

  • A link to your URL from Yelp can generate a healthy stream of business, so long as you have solid reviews

• Brand / wholesale partner sites

  • Many brand sites offer a ‘where to find us’ widget, which routes potential customers to various retail partners

  • Your pants manufacturers may offer the same functionality, and you should take advantage of it. Make sure Pants Town gets priority placement in that list

💡 The Point: you don’t give a hoot where your orders are coming from. Your site, another site, doesn’t matter. You are ‘agnostic to the origination point.’ You just like getting more orders.

👖❌ I've had enough of your pants talk

Totally fair.

My point is, retail is retail. A retailer that sells pants is - apologies - not that different from a retailer that sells cannabis. The same digital commerce rules apply.

For cannabis retailers, the to-do’s are similar:

• Build your website with enriched SEO and a great eComm flow, built to optimize visits, conversion, and average order value

• List your storefront on every single aggregated marketplace that doesn’t take advantage of you

  • Leafly sees 18 million site visits a month. Weedmaps is 12 million. Pure play eComm operators that have a marketplace component are small by comparison, but still meaningful

• Work with an eComm partner that has relationships with brands, so your listing can show up on their sites

  • Brand sites (Pax, Wana, etc.) see hundreds of thousands of visits per month. They have a vested interest in funneling prospective buyers to retail partners, because they can’t fulfill those orders themselves!

🏪 Marketplaces / platforms

When I chat with retailers who ask about generating incremental orders, the conversation often goes like this:

Retailer: okay, so Jane makes sense for our site. And what about my Leafly listing?

Me: Keep it, and we can automatically update it.

Retailer: And what about my Weedmaps listing?

Me: Keep it.

Retailer: And what about my other listings?

Me: Keep them.

Retailer: And I’ll get orders from Wana.com?

Me: Yep.

The rule of thumb: you’ll get more orders when you meet customers where they are. And where they are is shopping in all of those ^ disparate digital locations.

👨🏻‍🏫 The caveat

The big qualification here is that you should keep all of your listings as long as the listing provider is a good steward of you and your data.

Here’s an easy way to determine if you should work with a marketplace provider: ask them what they do with your data.

The answer will be enlightening.

📚 tl: dr

• I frequented Pants Town, and I bought baggy pants there

• A digital roadmap for building a retail presence is, approximately:

  • Build website optimized for organic search and conversion

  • List on relevant platforms, where your target customers might be shopping, including listing services and brand sites

• The same roadmap goes for cannabis retailers. Who cares where your order came from, as long as it landed in your lap and you own all the data?

• Btw, ask any digital partner what they do with your data

• It is Thursday