Minnesota cannabis retail intelligence.

BLAZE ECOM is a native e-commerce platform designed specifically for cannabis dispensaries. It allows licensed cannabis retailers to create and manage their online store, providing a seamless and compliant shopping experience for customers. Unlike a marketplace, you own your data, your customer relationships, and your brand’s online presence.

Dispensary e-commerce has unique challenges and requirements due to the highly regulated nature of the cannabis industry. Key differences include:

• Compliance: E-commerce platforms must meet state-mandated regulations and record sales via a POS system that integrates with seed-to-sale tracking systems (like Metrc or BioTrack) for real-time reporting.
• Age Verification: Websites must have built-in age gates to verify that customers are of legal age before they can browse products or place an order.
• Purchase Limits: The system must automatically enforce state-specific daily purchase limits to ensure customers do not exceed the legal amount of product they can buy in a single transaction.
• Inventory Synchronization: Real-time synchronization with the dispensary’s Point-of-Sale (POS) system is crucial to prevent overselling and to ensure online menus are always accurate.
• Fulfillment: Shipping cannabis by mail is not legal in most places. Dispensary e-commerce focuses on in-store pickup, curbside pickup, or local delivery.
• Payments: Due to federal regulations, traditional payment processors are often not an option. Cannabis e-commerce solutions must support compliant payment methods like ACH.

This is a critical distinction that impacts your business’s long-term success.

• iFrame E-commerce: An iFrame (or “inline frame”) is an HTML document embedded within your website. When you use an iFrame for your menu, you’re essentially displaying a menu hosted on a third-party platform.
  • Pros: Quick and easy to set up.
  • Cons: You lose control over your data, branding, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google cannot “see” the content within an iFrame, meaning your product pages won’t be indexed. This makes it difficult for customers to find your dispensary and products through organic searches. You are also at the mercy of the third-party provider for any updates or changes.
• Native E-commerce: A native e-commerce platform, like BLAZE ECOM, is fully integrated into your website. Your online menu and product pages are part of your website’s code, not just a window to another site.
  • Pros: You own your customer data and analytics, which is essential for marketing and growth. It’s great for SEO because search engines can crawl and index your product and category pages, driving more organic traffic to your site. You have full control over branding and the customer experience, allowing you to create a seamless journey from browsing to checkout.
  • Cons: The initial setup for native e-commerce takes more time, but the investment is worth it. It gives you complete control over your brand and online presence.

BLAZE ECOM is designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing dispensary website. If you already have a website, BLAZE ECOM can be integrated as a native menu. However, BLAZE also offers a robust Content Management System (CMS), BLAZE Sites, that allows you to manage your website content and your e-commerce menu from a single platform, ensuring a consistent brand experience. The platform also syncs in real-time with BLAZE Retail POS, so your inventory, pricing, customer data, and promotions are always up to date across all channels.

BLAZE offers a solution for dispensaries that don’t have a website. BLAZE Sites is an all-in-one CMS platform that combines content and e-commerce, allowing you to easily build and manage a professional, high-converting website with drag-and-drop editing and customizable templates. This lets you get your online presence up and running without the need for a separate web development agency.

Yes.

BLAZE is purpose-built to meet the needs of multi-location dispensaries and multi-state operators (MSOs). The platform allows you to manage all of your locations from a single dashboard, while providing a consistent online shopping experience for your customers.

Key benefits for multi-location businesses include:

• Unified Customer Experience: Customers can shop seamlessly across all of your locations. The system automatically detects their nearest store based on their location and updates the menu dynamically, ensuring they see accurate, local inventory.
• Centralized Customer Profiles: Reward points and customer profiles follow customers no matter which location they visit or what channel they use. For example, a returning customer using a kiosk only needs to enter their date of birth to access their full shopping profile, past purchases, and loyalty rewards.
• Single Dashboard Management: Manage all of your locations from a single dashboard, with features such as a centralized product catalog to maintain consistent data across all dispensaries, inter-store inventory transfers, and company-level analytics to access unified data for all of your stores in one place.
• Shared Loyalty & Promotions: Create consistent promotions and loyalty programs that can be applied across some or all of your locations, reinforcing your brand identity.

No, BLAZE ECOM is not a marketplace. A marketplace is a platform that hosts multiple retailers and controls your customer data. With BLAZE, you own your online store and all of your customer data. This means you have full control over your brand, your customer relationships, and your marketing.