Delivery for cannabis retail: what's actually different

A lot of cannabis stores start delivery the same way any small retailer would: a driver, a phone, and a WhatsApp chat to coordinate. It works, for a while, and then it doesn't - usually right around the point where there's more than one driver on the road at once.

The part general delivery apps skip

Generic delivery software is built around one assumption: if the order arrives at the address, the delivery is complete. Cannabis delivery has an extra requirement most delivery apps were never built for - confirming the recipient is who they say they are, and old enough to legally receive the order, at the door. That's not a checkbox that can be bolted onto a food-delivery workflow after the fact.

What a delivery order actually needs to carry

• Which driver is assigned, and where they are in their run
• ID verification at the point of handover, not just at checkout
• Proof of delivery tied to that specific order
• A delivery fee that reflects distance, rather than one flat rate for a five-minute trip and a forty-minute one

Why flat delivery fees stop making sense

A single delivery fee is simple to set up and expensive to run. Close deliveries subsidise far ones, or far deliveries get quietly deprioritised because they're not worth a driver's time at that price. Fees banded by distance fix both problems at once - a customer five minutes away and a customer forty minutes away each pay something that reflects the actual trip.

Where this connects back to the till

Delivery orders are still orders - they should hit the same stock count, the same loyalty account, and the same reporting as a walk-in sale. Running delivery through a separate app from the till means reconciling two systems by hand at the end of the day, which is exactly the kind of manual step that produces the small, unexplainable discrepancies covered in a companion piece on stock takes and shrinkage.

Budstack treats a delivery order as a normal sale with an extra step, not a separate workflow bolted onto the side - distance-banded fees, driver assignment, and ID verification all live in the same system as the rest of the store.