The best place to start is always at the beginning.
Even a few years ago is ancient history in the world of cannabis ecommerce. Believe it or not, in 2019, GrowHealthy had what I would describe as the worst website in the world. It reeked of that ‘my brothers nephew is a web-master’ vibe. We’re talking terrible, basically unusable UX. A navigation structure that made absolutely no sense. And the literal epitome of what-not-to-do when designing a shopping cart. But these weren’t even the real challenges we would face.
So what did we do about this?
Problems of this magnitude take graceful touches to sort out.
Sure we could spend months upon months designing and building a completely new website with all the bells and whistles of the modern day, but that doesn’t help us now. That doesn’t help abysmal numbers. That doesn’t help a fractured marketing team with little unity come together.
Starting small, with big wins.
Anyone who’s worth their salt in this business will tell you that designing and building a site is actually the easy part. The real challenge is getting internal stakeholders, team members, and brick-and-morter store associates on board with a new system.
For the higher-ups this can be straightforward. How much revenue do we predict this will generate? Will we get our ROI on your services? That question is impossible to answer without first getting the day-to-day players trained, unified, and excited about the new path forward.
For the store associates and content editors, this can be much more of a challenge.
The real unseen challenges to a re-platofrming project:
- Can in-store associates easily transition to a possible new point of sale system?
- How quickly / effectively will they adapt new inventory picking, packing, and tracking business operations?
- Will in-house graphic designers easily adapt not just a new design system, but also to a new standard of quality for what is acceptable?
- Can the team as a whole keep this new standard rolling long into the future?
One step at a time
The first thing we did was to step back and take a look at this whole mess. The technical mess, the personnel mess, the design mess, everything. We decided that our best course of action would be start this whole process off with excitement instead of anxiety. We were going to launch a brand new product line, but on the old site.
That sounds insane.
Hear me out. The current site was on woocommerce, and although they were not using properly, it had buy-in from the in-house tech team and CTO. This actually presented a great opportunity.
We knew we were going to be using WooCommerce to sell cannabis online due to it being open source and none of the big boys in the biz like Shopify wanting to party with THC. So why not simply create a new product detail page for our new and very exciting new product, ‘The Master Grower’s Series’.
Let’s talk about the benefits here:
- We had a very short design and development journey to get a system out there that would closely resemble the new, fully redesigned site.
- We only had 1 product for in-store associates to deal with. They only had this single product ringing into their POS systems. This caused less confusion and gave them a chance to understand how the system works without risking absolute chaos.
- We could easily control the design narrative. The ‘Master Grower’s Series’ had a specific branding that we wanted to convey. Again it was small, light steps design wise, which in turn, helped us get in-house design teams on the wagon with us while simultaneously giving us a stake in the ground to use as a reference to shut down other art and materials we deemed sub-par.
So, what happened?
We sold out of the new ‘Master Grower’s Series’ flower in every one of the 40+ retail locations (thousands of units) within 28 minutes. Yes. 28 minutes. It was actually incredible to watch.
Why did this perform so well and the previous online store perform so awful?
Well, for starters we made online checkout easy and intuitive. We didn’t reinvent the wheel. We just made it as easy to buy this single cannabis product as easy as buying any other product online. What a novel idea.
Of course that was part of the success, but the real driver was an integrated email campaign that hyped the new product and was consistently designed from first touch all the way through to customer checkout.
We paired this with a social campaign that didn’t violate any of instagram’s rules that included engaging motion graphics and video, all of which led to a landing page, consistent with the design that provided a personal feel while also triggering the good ol’ FOMO effect.
Get it while supplies last.
Instagram Compliant Teaser Video
Why this worked so well:
- Consistent messaging and imagery
- Customer touch points on social, owned media and email, as well as the website
- Ability to pre-order the product
- Building sense of urgency and FOMO by displaying how much stock quantity was available
- Give the product a human feel via an ‘About the grower’ story
- Attach true, relevant consumer testimonials in marketing materials.
All of these small, calculated moves generated phenomenal results.
One way to look at this is to celebrate the success of selling out a single product, but the true win here is that we reinvigorated the GrowHealthy team. Seeing is believing and they now saw and understood why and how just a fraction of what we were planning for the ecommerce platform would open a new portal to an otherwise unrealized stream of revenue.
We had overcome the unseen issues, before the big kickoff.
- Key stakeholders now saw the true value and revenue potential and were much more willing to provide time and budget to the project.
- In-store associates got a taste of the system and could begin slowly and effectively adopting it.
- In-house marketing teams now understood the value of a solid design system and how effective it can be when paired with a strong marketing strategy.
Needless to say, we moved ahead with the project.
And the rest is proverbial history. A smooth and balanced approach to the replatforming combined with a steady stream of marketing emails, social media posts, and overall great content continued to win over users. The new site was just simply easier to use than competitors. It was simply more convenient to shop at home or on your phone than it was to stand in line at the physical store and select a product in person.
All of this was made successful by not underestimating where the real challenges lie. In most cases the real problems are three steps back from the ones directly in front of you. Skillfully predicting those challenges and planning ways to overcome them in light stride is the unsung talent in this industry. Something to consider before starting your next big re-platforming project…
