Jane Technologies today announced the launch of its new point-of-sale (POS) platform that it says will improve the overall cannabis shopping experience with reliable online listings and in-store curated shopping recommendations.
Everyone knows the pain. You find your favorite strain on your dispensary’s online menu, only to go to the shop and discover it’s out of stock. You can either pick another strain at random or rely on the questionable advice of the local budtender. Jane’s new POS system aims to change that bummer of a situation, and it’s using its massive e-commerce data catalog to tackle in-store retail.
The new POS integrates with Jane Technologies’ existing e-commerce and advertising solutions product lines. The company started by building the back end for dispensaries’ e-commerce operations. To Jane Technologies, the future of cannabis isn’t a single destination like Amazon; the future of cannabis is the neighborhood dispensary that sells weed online. Jane wants to power their online store — and now the company wants to power their brick-and-mortar locations, too.
Jane’s POS platform includes a debit card payment system, custom hardware, and a personalized shopping experience. But the secret sauce comes from Jane Technologies’ long dedication to providing clean data assets. The company already tracks 1.5 million SKUs, and when new products are launched (or old products modified), Jane’s system pushes the data to its customer base. Shop owners can focus on selling weed while Jane’s platform does the heavy lifting around inventory management.
This new system provides dispensaries with a deep level of customer personalization. As Jane Technologies’ CEO Socrates Rosenfeld explained to me, the regulation around cannabis presents retailers with a unique opportunity. Before entering a dispensary, shoppers must scan their government-issued ID, and suddenly, the retailer knows who’s shopping and what they like to purchase. Jane’s new POS takes advantage of this process, and the system serves the budtender with a list of products previously purchased by the customer and a list of recommended products backed by verified reviews.
“In-store displays can be curated specifically for you,” Rosenfeld said. “Think about the Budtender who will know your preferences and purchase history, and they can recommend more curated personal items.”
This system has long been a staple of online e-commerce, including on Jane Technologies’ e-commerce platform, but now the same platform works in a retail environment that depends heavily on recommendations.
Jane Technologies says integrating the platform with a dispensary’s inventory takes just a couple of hours. They say competitors can take weeks to complete a transition because of the work associated with exporting important product information, imagery, and government tracking IDs.
The system also allows for stand-alone, vending machine–type kiosks that are designed for speed and efficiency, allowing customers to browse and purchase products using a large touchscreen instead of speaking with a retail associate.
Jane Technologies has been testing this system at three dozen partners across the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, California and Colorado. The company expects its new POS platform to be in 400 retail locations by the end of the year.