Why is buying weed online still this clunky?

Hi all, first time posting here.

I’ve been a product designer for a long time and a weed fan just as long. I was in SF during the shift from medical to recreational, and now I’m in NYC watching it happen all over again.

As someone who orders pretty regularly, I keep noticing the same small but consistent issues across a lot of dispensary sites. Individually they’re small, but together they add a surprising amount of friction:

• inconsistent or hard-to-find calls to action (shop, cart, etc.)
• filtering that’s either too limited or not very useful
• duplicate information (brand listed multiple times, titles doing too much and not enough)
• weak or inconsistent product imagery
• categories hidden in horizontal carousels instead of just being clearly visible
• no clear “start here” path for someone who just wants to browse

And one that stands out in particular:

A lot of sites feel split in two — a marketing homepage, and then a separate ordering experience (often Dutchie) that looks and behaves completely differently.

As a customer, it makes the whole thing feel disjointed and frustrating, even when the product and store are solid.

What I’m especially curious about from the operator side is the data behind all of this.

• Are you tracking where people drop off in the ordering flow?
• Do you look at things like abandoned carts, order completion rates, or time on site?
• Do you have visibility into where customers hesitate, or is most of that kind of a black box depending on the platform?

It feels like a lot of these small user experience issues would show up pretty clearly in those numbers, but I’m not sure how much access or control operators actually have there.

Not here to pitch anything — just genuinely interested in how people running shops are thinking about this. As someone who has worked on the digital side of this for the better part of two decades, it might just be how my brain works, but once you start seeing the patterns it’s hard not to notice where things are breaking down, especially when I know they are pretty fixable.