Choosing your cannabis dispensary tech stack is a crucial piece in setting up your store for success. From point-of-sale to loyalty, you want to provide customers with a premium experience while minimizing any potential hurdles so you can focus on what you do best: selling cannabis.
In researching SaaS providers, there are dozens of players in the space. And you shouldn’t commit to any service at first glance or initial sales pitch. Always do your research. Here’s what we found…
When it comes to cannabis eCommerce, Dispense beats out Dutchie across the board. Of course we are biased, but hear us out.
Selling cannabis online via eCommerce is non-negotiable for dispensaries. In this tech-based world, solely focusing on a brick-and-mortar store is no longer enough – you have to be online. The convenience of online shopping combined with the popularity of loyalty programs makes eCommerce a no-brainer. When searching for providers, there are 3 types of menus: native, iFrame (aka embedded), and custom build.
Dispense’s eCommerce solution equips retailers with a native menu, meaning it lives on your website domain. The Dispense menu is SEO optimized to give retailers ideal product content, metadata, and URL structures – all readable by search engines.
Dispense has the most performant menus in cannabis. The highest eCommerce conversion rates occur on pages with 0-2s load times – Dispense averages page load speeds of less than 2 seconds. Faster site speed gives you higher search engine rankings, and higher rankings mean more organic search traffic for your business.
Dutchie provides both native and iFrame menu options, as well as a custom build.
With Dispense, retailers always have 100% control of their customer data. When you own your data, you can use it to gain key customer insights and track order analytics. These numbers can be used to plan, strategize, and market your store. Dispense will never market to or share your customers' information.
When you use an iFrame menu hosted by a marketplace like Dutchie, there is a fundamental conflict of interest because you are sharing all customer and transaction data with a 3rd party whose sole goal is to sell cannabis – regardless of which retailer it comes from. When you aren’t given explicit ownership, it’s impossible to know what exactly a provider is doing with your valuable customer data.
Search engine optimization is the process of driving free, organic traffic to your website to improve your site’s position in search results. To learn more about the importance of SEO for your business, check out the Beginner’s Guide to Dispensary SEO.
SEO is one of the things Dispense does best. Every product, brand, and category using Dispense's SEO menu is searchable and can land your business in search results for the most searched cannabis keywords. Dispense generates dedicated URLs that are built to drive organic traffic and maximize search engine visibility. The best part? Once you select your settings, the SEO optimization for hundreds – even thousands – of product pages is totally automatic.
iFrames have their uses and benefits, but SEO isn’t one of them. If you want your website pages to rank high in search engines, forgo the embedded iFrame menu for your eCommerce site. Opting for the Dutchie Subdomain or custom build, however, will open up your website to search engine optimization (if your development team knows how).
Dispense supports dozens of integrations to seamlessly blend into an existing tech stack. From POS to analytics, payments, and delivery, Dispense already works with your favorite partners.
Dutchie, on the other hand, blocks certain providers from integrating; namely, digital payment partners like Aeropay, KindTap, and TreezPay. Understandably, they don’t want to welcome competitors to their DutchiePay service. But, it does limit choices for retailers who may want to go in a different direction.
When your business is ready to sell cannabis online, consider the particulars of these two e-commerce strategies to make the best decision for your dispensary. At Dispense, we empower cannabis retailers to sell cannabis on their website with the sleek and powerful online shopping experience customers have come to expect. Own your customer data, kickstart your marketing strategy, and optimize your website all under one roof.
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