🛠 An Ode to Home Depot

Cannabis eCommerce needs to grow up.

Manual updates and store-by-store searching suffice for small operations - but as the industry consolidates - as chains grow and provide service to a bigger and bigger swath of Americans - we must evolve our technology to match best practices in traditional retail verticals.

Importantly, we want to follow the lead of traditional retailers that carry common products across multiple stores - this EXCLUDES restaurants. Restaurant tech is manual and small-scale and closed-loop. It’s bad for cannabis. We’ve discussed this.

💲 The Private Marketplace and Home Depot

Home Depot provides an excellent example of a “private marketplace”.

Great question!

When most people think of the term “marketplace,” they think of a two-sided marketplace, wherein many sellers sell things to buyers. In the digital world, a great example is eBay - sellers can create an account, create products for sale, and sell them. Buyers can create an account, peruse inventories of various sellers, and buy products.

Cannabis also has two-sided marketplaces. Weedmaps is one of them, where many sellers (dispensaries) can list items for sale, and buyers (Weedmaps.com customers) can peruse items and (sometimes) purchase them.

Traditionally, dispensaries have participated in two-sided marketplaces, as well as curated their own, native eComm experience on their own sites (where they don’t have to compete with the many other sellers of a two-sided marketplace). However, native eCommerce has operated in store-by-store silos; in other words, you select your store (or allow your device to geolocate you), then peruse one relevant inventory.

This store selection —> browsing flow works for small operators, but it is not ideal for large enterprises.

Think about navigating a 30+ store cannabis chain - do you really want to muddle through a drop-down of that size? Or, if you choose to be geolocated and routed to the appropriate inventory, do you really want to limit your browsing to ONLY products from that specific store?

No!

💡 The private marketplace is an eCommerce execution that aggregates all products from one retailer - across many storefronts - into one shopping experience for buyers. During the shopping journey, customers are served information about products that are “reasonably available” to them, not just products from one store.

🥰 My Love Letter to Home Depot

Let’s talk about shopping flow on Homedepot.com, and what it means to my heart.

🏠 Home Page

^Here’s the first thing I see. It’s a home page. Nothing super fancy. The website is asking permission to locate me, to show me the most relevant items first. Importantly, the shopping experience will still show me items outside of my home store.

^Now the system knows where I am, and gives me store hours of my local store in Thousand Oaks.

The home page carousel offers relevant deals and discounts - these are the items that Home Depot, for whatever reason, wants to move first. I have highlighted a spring special for patio furniture above. What happens when we click ‘Shop Now?’

^We are taken to a pre-filtered menu of relevant items. You can see the filter pathway in blue.

💡 The ‘Shop Now’ button was “deep-linked” to display this pre-filtered view - it’s a smart way to leverage real estate across the various pages of your website to direct people to high-value destinations on your menu.

⚙️ Finding a Jigsaw

I broke my father-in-law’s jigsaw over the weekend. Debatable on the condition of the jigsaw when I received it, but still, I broke it. So time to look for another one - let’s talk about Home Depot’s search engine.

I type “jigsaw,” and predictive text pops up. That’s a nice touch. I click “jigsaw” and I’m taken here:

^The system shows me variations / types at the top (corded, cordless, etc.); if you click those, the system filters down the menu to what you want.

The filter functionality is best-in-class, and you can get as granular as you need:

Results, ultimately, are in the main body of the page.

^Home Depot tags their products with “New” or “Exclusive,” etc. - pretty standard.

💡 The magic happens at the bottom of the product cards - Home Depot’s private marketplace shows me items that are reasonably available to me. In other words, I should see items that are in my home store, plus items that can be shipped (to my house or to the store), as well as items that are reasonably nearby - where I might be willing to drive for the right item.

Pause for a second…

Let the magic of a private marketplace seep into your brain. Whereas Home Depot could have shown me only items in stock at my home location, they opt to show me items that are reasonably available to me.

Now, let’s translate that to cannabis, where shoppers are often motivated to find a very specific product (exclusive flower drops, for example), and are more than willing to travel to purchase those products. As a retail chain, we don’t want to pigeonhole them into one storefront, and we sure as hell don’t want them searching every store for that one item (or bouncing to a different retailer to find it)…enter private marketplace.

🤷‍♀️ Can we do this today? In cannabis?

Yes. It requires standardized data and good tech, but yes.

📚 tl;dr

• Store-by-store shopping limits customer choice, as they can’t see the full offering of a retail chain in one view

• Private marketplaces aggregate all items from a retail chain, and allows customers to shop product-first, fulfillment-second

• Home Depot is a great example of a private marketplace, and they also leverage smart deep-links and filtering

• I broke my father-in-law’s jigsaw

• It is Wednesday