🤷🏻‍♂️ Do you really want a custom menu?

So, first off - the subject matter of this post revolves around deploying eCommerce for cannabis dispensaries. That is literally my job description, so I feel like I should call out my biases up front:

I work at Jane. This newsletter is called Brian @ Jane. I think Jane is the best.

However! I am self-aware enough to see trends for what they are and be honest about where I think the industry is heading.

So, feel free to discount my opinions based on my loyalties, but I’ll try (as I always do) to present things in an objective way.

Great!

eCommerce is here to stay

When I was cold calling dispensaries in early 2018 in Los Angeles, a lot of people didn’t see the point in a digital presence for their dispensary. Like, they didn’t even have a website. At the time, a Weedmaps listing was - in some circles - considered the only thing you really needed.

Weedmaps was also exorbitantly expensive for top-billing in a market like LA, and the ROI was relatively hard to prove at the time. So some forward-thinking folks jumped on the tech train and openly sought out alternatives and augmentations.

There was a seismic shift around then: people started to put an emphasis on their owned digital assets instead of marketplaces.

In other words, they wanted to build up their own branding on their own website to curate a great experience for their customers. So that the flighty, browsing customers would be loyal, likely-to-return ones.

Enter the embedded menu solution.

There were some popular players, especially in Southern California where I worked. Baker was big then. Greenrush. The Treez eComm widget. Meadow.

And Jane. We were expanding quickly with our iframe solution, because it provided standardized product content, was incredibly easy to deploy, and offered the highest conversion rates in the industry.

Marketing preferences evolve and become more precious

As we took a big chunk of the market, others did, too. All of a sudden, it seemed as though every menu was recognizable, even if they were lightly customized.

At the same time, retail operators became more sophisticated and starting poaching digital marketing folks from traditional retail. Digital marketing folks are super precious about the look and feel of their website, which is totally understandable.

So people started seeking out a more custom front-end experience, which meant starting from scratch, using a semi-custom cannabis eComm partner (there are a few), or building on “headless” eCommerce APIs like Jane Roots.

Canna Cabana, the High Tide banner, opted to build on Jane Roots and execute a front-end that looks nothing like our standard offering:

Canna Cabana is a huge operator with a good amount of cash and a capable team. On the flipside, we have seen smaller or less well-prepared partners underestimate the scale and scope of a project like this - especially if they are working with a non-Jane tech partner that hasn’t been battle-tested or just isn’t very good.

Ultimately, too, all they are trying to do is gain performance parity with an out-of-the-box eCommerce menu, most of which have been iterated and optimized over the course of 5+ years. It’s hard to do! It was hard for us to get conversion rates going north of 30%, and it’s all we do.

So, as an operator, the trade-off becomes: do you care enough about the front-end experience simply being different from others - enough that you’ll take the resource risk to throw some money and time at a fresh build?

I struggle with the answer, because I love seeing native eCommerce that doesn’t look like anything else. But, in the spirit of being transparent - if I was a retail operator, I would focus on operating retail and cede the tech stuff to the experts.

Meeting in the middle

Of course, this choice is only a drastic one because flexibility in the technology hasn’t caught up yet. There is a future of WYSIWYG editors and endless templates that will enable operators to design their interface to their delight - while still avoiding the difficult technological hurdles.

In the meantime, I always urge operators to think long and hard about a custom solution. If you are willing, financially stable, and capable - it is definitely worth the effort. And with Jane, it’s more likely you’ll succeed. I think Canna Cabana and Columbia Care are proof positive of that. But it always comes with a degree of risk that some operators probably shouldn’t take on.

Here’s how I think about it visually:

📚 tl;dr

• At first, retail operators thought a listing on a marketplace was sufficient to grow their business

• Then, they wanted to conduct business in their own ecosystem, and hopefully build their brand and keep customers returning to their site

• Then, they got a little precious about front-end appearance, and sought out alternatives to traditional menu deployments - often without considering the scope of the project

• Traditional solutions (iframe / subdomain with enriched local SEO) are perfect for most of the universe - because they require very little work and allow retail operators to actually operate retail

• For more tech savvy and well-funded operators, a native (headless) build is warranted and can actually achieve incredibly impressive results

• It is Thursday