5 Best Practices for Fulfilling Dispensary Orders

Ensuring that every customer receives the products they want is a high priority for cannabis retailers. Whether it’s a purchase made in store, pre-order, or delivery, fulfilling dispensary orders can get confusing if your business isn’t equipped with the right tools. Organization is key when you have several methods of selling cannabis and need to keep accurate sales reports for compliance.

In this article, we’ll cover a few of the best practices for retail staff when fulfilling dispensary orders.

Knowledge of Compliance

Making sure that all of your retail staff are aware and up-to-date on compliance practices and cannabis regulations is imperative. The majority of transactions take place in-store from customers, however pick-up and delivery transactions must also be taken into account.

One of the most important practices to establish is the age and patient validation at the point-of-sale. If ordering online this documentation must be uploaded when ordering and verified when picking up or by delivery driver.

Integrated Point of Sale

Utilizing an integrated point-of-sale system is paramount so that you can avoid doing double data entry for state reporting. An integrated POS speaks to other software systems and automatically transfers data in real-time.

This is very advantageous when dealing with compliance as you can be sure your sales numbers are accurate and submitted on time, every time. This is also beneficial when integrating with other supply chain software and will save you from paying your staff overtime just to do data entry.

Real-Time Syncing

While many point-of-sale providers claim to have compliance integration, many of them will still require you to export reports and upload them to the state reporting system. This is very inconvenient and time consuming.

Installing a dispensary point of sale that truly is fully integrated will provide your retailer with real-time syncing so there is no downloading and uploading. As soon as a transaction is complete the sales information is recorded and sent directly to compliance software systems such as Metrc. This reduces the chances of human error when sending compliance reports and provides a safeguard against any infractions.

Fulfilling Pre-Orders

Another smart way to manage fulfilling dispensary orders is to use one point-of-sale register just for pre-orders online. Having a dedicated POS unit will help you keep track of online sales and serve as an express line for pick-up orders.

Once a pre-order is placed using the POS software it is immediately removed from inventory and sent to the pre-order queue where it can be prepared for delivery or picked up by customers. Every marijuana dispensary should be using ecommerce to supplement their in-store sales and the right cannabis POS system can streamline pre-orders.

Reliable Cannabis Software

Online orders can really flood in once your retailers starts promoting the online order option. It’s paramount to have a reliable cannabis point-of-sale software that can integrate with online to succeed with ecommerce. IndicaOnline has developed tailor made features for streamlining pre-orders and integrating with your online store and third party menu listing like Weedmaps and Potify.

We will soon release an offline mode that will allow your sales functionality to continue running even in the event of an internet or server outage. We are committed to providing a reliable solution to cannabis retailers that can meet demand in-store and online. To learn more about our ecommerce integration, schedule a demo with one of our team members.