Those who anticipated a kind of feeding frenzy as cannabis went legal in Canada on Oct. 17 were certainly vindicated in their expectation. In person, lines of eager citizens stretched through the cold outside cannabis stores to make their first legal purchase, and online, huge numbers of orders were placed. One private company played a big role in helping suppliers meet the challenge: Shopify.<\/p>\n
Online cannabis vendors using Shopify\u2019s e-commerce software collectively processed more than 100 orders per minute on Oct. 17,\u00a0the company reported<\/a>. The provincial governments of British Columbia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador all turned to the Ottawa-based company to provide them with the technical wherewithal.<\/p>\n \u201cShopify stores experienced no outages,\u201d the company\u2019s director for regulated industries Brad Goble said in an e-mailed response to Canada\u2019s\u00a0Financial Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Goble said\u00a0Shopify<\/a>\u00a0had been working with provincial governments and Licensed Producers, as well as private retailers, throughout the year to prepare for opening-day cannabis sales. And on that day, he added, the company \u201csaw an average of over 100 transactions per minute across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the first 12 hours of legalized cannabis sales, we saw millions of visitors to the stores with tens of thousands of transactions,\u201d Goble said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cIn the first 24 hours, we expect hundreds of thousands of orders. In the first week, we expect millions of orders,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Several cannabis companies were already using Shopify to help them coordinate and manage sales. For example, Canopy Growth\u2019s Tweed and Aurora Cannabis\u2019s CanniMed use Shopify to sell cannabis online, according to a Shopify statement quoted by the\u00a0Financial Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Goble added that Shopify is also \u201cpowering licensed retailers,\u201d such as\u00a0National Access Cannabis Corp<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Delta 9 Cannabis Inc<\/a>, both of which launched brick-and-mortar retail outlets in Winnipeg on the fateful day of Oct. 17.<\/p>\n Shopify CEO Loren Padelford boasted to\u00a0Ottawa CBC News<\/a>: \u201cThe volume has been great. There have been no crashes and we have seen a lot of people interested in this new retail market. It has been an exciting first day. There have been more than a million people that have hit one of the sites that we\u2019re supporting. We are already over 100,000 transactions and we\u2019re running at about 100 orders per minute which, by any means is a really strong day.\u201d<\/p>\n Padelford drew a comparison to Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But it still didn\u2019t approach the company\u2019s busiest day ever. He said a recent\u00a0Kylie Jenner lip kit drop\u00a0resulted in a thousand orders on Shopify per minute.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still a substantial sale,\u201d he stated, \u201cand we expect it to get bigger over time as more sites come online in Canada and people become more familiar with the stores and the products and they start to makes sales.\u201d<\/p>\n As with all online sales, concerns have been raised about privacy and security \u2014 and these are heightened here because of the stigma still attached to cannabis in many social circles, and the fact that it remains illegal at the federal level in the United States.<\/p>\n Speaking<\/a>\u00a0at an event in Toronto in May, Padelford sought to reassure consumers and investors on this point, saying, \u201cThere\u2019s lots of attention being paid to the security of the data and ensuring that people\u2019s private information isn\u2019t shareable or easily accessed.\u201d<\/p>\n But Ellie Abraham, writing in\u00a0The Independent<\/a>, raised a skeptical eyebrow. \u201cHackers prove a real threat to e-commerce, and the security of data in this new and thriving industry is something to be extremely mindful of,\u201d she warned.<\/p>\n This is an especially critical concern in Ontario, where authorities initially instated a provincial government monopoly and mail-only system for all cannabis sales. While the provincial government\u00a0finally blinked<\/a>\u00a0in August and agreed to allow private retail shops, thanks to the delay these won\u2019t be opening for several months yet. Until then, shopping online through the\u00a0Ontario Cannabis Store<\/a>\u00a0will be the only option for the purchase of legal cannabis.<\/p>\n Abraham wrote that given the \u201crisk of sharing personal data online, it is my fear that until the provincial government are able to approve and open private retail stores, we will see people turn to the black market \u2014 completely contradicting one of the main objectives of legalisation.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, would you order cannabis online?<\/p>\n The post Shopify Is Helping Canadian Governments Meet Online Demand for Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Those who anticipated a kind of feeding frenzy as cannabis went legal in Canada on Oct. 17 were certainly vindicated in their expectation. In person, lines of eager citizens stretched through the cold outside cannabis stores to make their first legal purchase, and online, huge numbers of orders were placed.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,50,170,687,6217,6218],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30013"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30014,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30013\/revisions\/30014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Security Concerns With Online Sales<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Shopify Is Helping Canadian Governments Meet Online Demand for Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"