On April 20, 2024, the annual Cannabis Sale Day, Dutchie, the popular point of sale (POS) system used by cannabis dispensaries, will help approximately 6,000 retailers and shoppers in the U.S. and Canada Time was also left in the dark. This was all caused by a system crash, making it the second year in a row that a system outage has occurred.
Many pharmacies took to social media to share their frustrations, disappointments, and difficulties. Some of the more than 6,000 operators who experienced power outages said they were left powerless, customers angry and sales lost. Some likened the April 20 troubles to the Black Friday power outages suffered by major retailers like Walmart and Amazon.
With holidays like Canada Day, Independence Day, and 7/10 approaching, what can your e-commerce and POS system do for you?
Regulatory changes by state
Unlike other industries, cannabis continues to face legality challenges that pose industry-specific issues such as processing transactions.
“Cannabis and marijuana transactions involve layers of compliance that other industries don't have. For example, a clothing store's POS system includes additional features such as age verification, local laws, and purchase restrictions. There may not be,” said Ryan Zens, CTO of cannabis retail platform Cova Software.
He noted that the legality of marijuana varies by state, each with its own laws and regulations. For example, Florida's cannabis POS system is different than Oklahoma's. Although both states have legal medical marijuana, they have different laws regarding purchase limits and other parameters.
Cause of POS outage
POS outages occur at least once a year for approximately 81% of businesses. These incidents are related to internet or cloud server outages, hardware issues, power outages, bugs, and data breaches.
When a POS outage occurs, business is lost. While traditional retailers are free to use alternative methods to collect payments in the event of a power outage, those methods are typically not available for processing cannabis transactions. The lack of alternatives is usually due to legality and regulation.
Volume testing to avoid POS outages on high volume days
Although laws vary within industries and by state, all POS systems must be able to handle all levels of volume. Many agree that volume-based outages are not common in traditional retail and should not occur in the cannabis industry.
Zens said trading volume was high on April 20, but not as much as when the iPhone 15 was released.
“Not only do we need to retain all sales information for reporting purposes, but we need a system that can handle the high volume of traffic, even on April 20th,” he said. Canada Day, July 4th, and July 10th are the next cannabis festivals that are expected to see heavy traffic in the United States and Canada.
Volume testing is a proactive approach to avoid the issues that occurred on April 20th. Zens said the importance of designing, building, and testing for high-volume production and testing from a failure perspective is important for POS system providers.
“Imagine a major retailer experiencing a point-of-sale outage because its systems could not handle the sales volume on Black Friday, traditionally known as a high-volume day.”
He says that while it may seem counterintuitive to design a system with the expectation that parts of it will fail, this idea allows the system to recover in the event of a failure. I mentioned that it can be designed like this.
“Technology teams need to continually monitor, test, and improve their systems to avoid surprises on high-volume days,” Zens said.
Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash
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