OREGON RESEARCH TRIP
My Role
Product Designer
UX research
Timeline
Q3 2022
Team
2 Designers
4 Product Managers
Background
The Commerce team dedicated Q1-Q3 of 2022 to learning more about buyer behavior and figuring out how to drive orders.
In June 2022, we took a trip out to Portland, OR, and were able to collect some great insights. Oregon is a state that we historically didn’t have a lot of research from, but in recent months we had been hearing about some very unique problems they have been experiencing statewide.
Goals
Learn about their ordering schedules, the breakdown of repeat and new products they carry in store, and how they discover those new products.
Learn how they are using LeafLink along with other industry-specific programs (ex. METRC), manual materials (ex. Quickbooks), and competitors (ex. Apex)
Find out who the primary decision makers are for both purchasing and payments (who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed)
Test out some in-progress designs for validation.
Participants
We had 8 customer meetings in total and a handful of impromptu meetings to try and get as much feedback as possible
Insights
Ordering
OR buyers use METRC and Greenbits with LeafLink. Some stores use APEX for ordering, or via email/phone/calling; however, LeafLink is the preferred marketplace for cannabis.
Reordering
Most stores generally reorder the same products. However, several buyers expressed that they will buy the same products but different flavors. We heard a lot of requests for adding ordering by variety.
Flower Purchasing
The flower market has a lot of issues and most Flower ordering is often done via “circular manifests”, where vendors travel door-to-door with bulk flower so that retailers can see/smell the flower before making purchasing decisions.
Payments
OR does not have good banking options and the majority of the time buyers are requesting cash to avoid “jumping through hoops” to get a bank account. Paying with terms also has an operational benefit to buyers and not just cash flow.
Industry relationships are key
Buyers have a large network of friends in the industry and want to maintain these relationships - if the person they’re ordering from is their friend, preferred buying and communication is offline, which is more personal and more efficient than ordering through LeafLink. Rather than have official “terms” on orders, buyers and sellers operate almost with IOUs.
Pain points
Buyers want more reporting options similar to what their POS provides: discount performance, Sales & activity (possibly storefront?).
Sellers want to be able to see more reporting about who has visited their menu and who is interacting with their products.
All the customers we spoke to complained that delivery windows are never respected by the seller.
Findings
Buyers find value in reporting features that pull + calculate all the data they need in one place to repurchase, even if they can’t purchase directly from them.
The customers we met with are creating their own custom reports, pulling data from multiple systems such as Apex, METRC, and Greenbits. One dispensary even hired a specific data person to put some of these manual reports together
Because pulling together this asynchronous data is so cumbersome, customers expressed a desire for more integrations or more efficient reporting where they can view all of their information in one place
Data and reports on inventory are first priority, and the ability to purchase straight from LeafLink/
the data would be an added bonus