The Best Dispensary POS Systems
The right POS system does more than process sales; it tracks inventory, ensures compliance, and improves the customer experience. Whether you manage a medical or recreational dispensary, find a system that handles the strict requirements of selling cannabis.
- Seamless integration with e-commerce, kiosk, and mobile app
- Provides flexible hardware compatibility
- Provides accurate and consistent product inventory
- Customizable product catalog
- Supports multiple integrations, such a Metrc
- Provides efficient inventory management
- Has multiple pricing plans to fit growing businesses
- Works offline
- Dashboard and reporting tools show real-time data
We tested and ranked the top POS systems explicitly designed for dispensaries, focusing on user experience, regulatory compliance, and feature depth.
BLAZE – Best for Recreational Dispensaries
BLAZE Retail offers a built-in loyalty program that attracts first-time customers, rewards repeat customers, and engages them to become advocates for your dispensary. Offering customers discounts through a loyalty program can improve customer retention, strengthen your brand’s reputation, and boost overall sales.
One key advantage of a loyalty program is its ability to incentivize customers to spend more. When customers make purchases, the POS system automatically tracks spending and adds points to their loyalty account, such as one point for every dollar spent. This can encourage customers to frequently visit and spend more as they aim to accumulate more points for rewards.
The loyalty program can also generate valuable data on customer purchasing behavior. It can analyze which products are frequently purchased and redeemed for rewards. If you notice a surge in redemptions for a particular product, you can increase your inventory counts to avoid stockouts and ensure that popular items are always available.
The program can also provide customer feedback and preferences, allowing you to use this information to make informed decisions about future orders, ensure products are in stock, and resonate with your customer base.
FlowHub – Best for Delivery
FlowHub’s delivery feature can integrate with your dispensary’s eCommerce provider, such as Shopify or WooCommerce, to facilitate seamless order intake, fulfillment, and compliance reporting.
With FlowHub, customers can order products online or through an app, choosing their preferred delivery options and selecting time slots during checkout. The system will schedule these deliveries automatically, ensuring they align with your operational capacity.
As the orders come in, your warehouse staff can pack and prepare the items for delivery. Once packing is complete, you can input the delivery addresses into FlowHub. The system will then calculate the most efficient delivery route, enabling drivers to deliver multiple orders in one trip, saving you time and money on fuel costs.
As drivers embark on their routes, your customers will receive updates about their order status. This transparency fosters trust and satisfaction, enhancing customers’ overall shopping experience.
Cova – Best for Medical Dispensaries
Medical dispensaries must comply with strict state regulations regarding age and identity verification. To ensure that only eligible patients make purchases, Cova offers a built-in ID scanner and purchase limit alerts that can increase security, help your staff prevent underage sales, and adhere to strict state regulations.
The built-in ID scanner can protect your dispensary and ensure the supplier meets regulatory requirements. The scanner utilizes optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read information from customer IDs. By cross-referencing the scanned data against various databases, Cova ensures that the identity of each customer is accurately confirmed. The system will assess the ID’s validity, check the expiration date, and verify that the customer is of legal age.
The results of this verification process are displayed in real-time on the POS screen, allowing your staff to quickly determine whether they can proceed with the customer’s purchase. The system will alert the staff if any issues arise during the screening, such as an expired ID or underage customer.
All verification actions are logged within the system, creating a comprehensive audit trail. This feature is essential for compliance reporting and record-keeping, providing the necessary documentation to demonstrate adherence to state regulations.
What Is A Dispensary POS System?
Dispensary POS systems are point-of-sale software solutions designed to facilitate sales transactions and manage operations in retail environments that sell regulated cannabis or medical marijuana products.
The solution puts an industry-specific focus on your traditional retail management needs to ensure cannabis retail compliance. This includes age verification, purchase limits, and hours of operation compliance. Dispensary POS systems will also create needed reports to send to state officials, help you analyze business performance, and help you increase your bottom line.
In light of the quick growth of cannabis retail businesses across the US, software vendors have been tweaking their solutions to ensure your solution helps you stay in line with the marijuana laws in your state.
Key Features
| Features | Functionality |
|---|---|
| Point of Sale (POS) | Supports payment collection, receipting, and back-office accounting processes. Integrates with scales to weigh product at checkout. Print labels and receipts. Scan barcodes on products. Apply discounts based on sales or loyalty rewards. |
| Inventory Management | Track vendors and monitor wholesale ordering. Allow detailed statistics to find out your most efficient reorder process. Track customer purchase history and traffic patterns to determine future demand. Receive alerts when stock levels are running low to ensure efficient purchase times. |
| Patient/Customer Management | Store patient prescription information. Keep an open line of communication with local area doctors to confirm medical files. Keep track of customer purchase histories. Provide loyalties and discounts to frequent shoppers. Ensure customers are not exceeding any limits established by the state or their doctor. |
| Reporting | Keep close records of your business operations to stay compliant with your state’s unique requirements surrounding the sale of cannabis. Make smarter decisions by managing income and expenses and learn where your business is succeeding and where your business can improve. |
Benefits
- Industry-specific use. There are hundreds, if not thousands of retail stores all selling a variety of goods. While some industries may have their own version of POS solutions, a majority of POS options may simply be advertised as “retail POS” and provide more of an industry-neutral or generic way at running a retail business (track daily sales, monitor inventory, improve purchasing, etc.) However, these solutions will require a heavy amount of configuration and training to provide the features you need to run a successful marijuana dispensary
- Keep track of state compliance. Many dispensary POS software solutions will have built-in compliance. It will help you submit information to any state reporting systems and help you submit the necessary information. Some states may require you to submit reports as frequently as daily. Failure to stay compliant can result in a loss of your license.
- Improved inventory management leading to better profit margins. When products such as THC-infused foods and CBD oil are flying off the shelves, it can be hard to ensure you have enough product in stock to meet demand. Improved inventory management can alert you when certain products are being sold at a faster pace than expected, so you can place purchase orders for more and ensure you can’t meet your customer’s demands.
Challenges
- Staying Compliant. Businesses that do not report the necessary details of their operation to the state face costly fines and store closures. Each local government that has legalized cannabis has its own unique requirements. Because of this, it may be hard to fine tune a non-specific POS to your local jurisdiction. These reports include on-demand sales reports and accurate inventory management. When pieces of inventory go missing due to human error, lack of quality assurance, poor packaging, or employee theft, you may face fines and even closures.
- Difficulty finding reliable business partners. Outside of vendors, wholesalers, manufacturers, and the customer, a dispensary is like any other business that will need outside assistance from accountants, lawyers, or technology providers. Any of these professionals will help your business stay on the right side of the law; the difficulty may be finding a technology partner who is well versed in the compliance issues your business faces.
- What is ok to sell and what is not? The 2018 Farm Bill seemed to pave the way for hemp-derived CBD products, but some local jurisdictions are being picky about what retailers can and can’t sell. In February 2019, New York City’s Department of Health implemented a ban on CBD as a food additive. While the sale of oil and vape cartridges are still fine, restaurants in NYC are no longer permitted to add anything to food or drink that is not approved safe. As it stands, CBD has not been deemed as a safe food additive in NYC. This means bakeries or coffee shops that added CBD to existing products may face a loss of business or have to make some serious revamp to their menus.
Pricing
Dispensary POS systems can range in price from $250 - $800 per month in subscription fees. Cova pricing begins at $349/month for their basic plan, whereas BLAZE starts at $500/month. Pricing will differ depending on your company size and the number of locations you have.
