RMG | Cannabis & CBD FAQ

Question 1

How do you handle age verification without killing conversion?

Accepted Answer

With tiers instead of one wall. A soft gate on entry that remembers the answer and never asks a returning customer twice, hard ID verification at checkout where the jurisdiction or the product form requires it, and third-party verification providers wired in so the check happens without a support ticket. The gate is also built to be crawlable, so the category and product pages you rank on don’t disappear behind it. Most sites lose a third of first-time traffic to a modal that was thrown in as an afterthought: the gate is a conversion surface, not a checkbox.

Question 2

Can you handle state-by-state shipping and eligibility restrictions?

Accepted Answer

Yes. As catalog logic rather than a disclaimer. Ship-to eligibility modeled per product and per state (THC thresholds, product form, potency, quantity limits), eligibility surfaced on the PDP and the collection page instead of at the checkout error, carrier restrictions and adult-signature requirements handled in the shipping rules, and a waitlist path for the states you can’t ship to yet. To be clear on the division of labor: your counsel decides what may ship where, and we build the rules engine, the surfacing, and the audit trail that enforce it.

Question 3

What do we do about payment processing when most processors restrict us?

Accepted Answer

Build for redundancy. High-risk and cannabis-friendly gateways integrated with real failover, so one processor pausing your account isn’t an outage; ACH, debit, and pay-by-bank as first-class options; a decline-recovery path that retries and re-routes instead of dropping the customer at an error page; and subscriptions that survive on a high-risk stack. We’re not your processor, your bank, or your underwriter. We integrate what your merchant services provider approves and make sure a single approval doesn’t become a single point of failure.

Question 4

Google and Meta restrict our ads. How are we supposed to acquire customers?

Accepted Answer

By owning the channels nobody can switch off. SEO and content built around the questions this category actually gets searched with, programmatic through cannabis-friendly networks and DSPs, category marketplaces and dispensary locators (Leafly, Weedmaps, brand-to-retail listings), affiliate and creator programs, and email and SMS built to the carrier rules that apply to the category. Where a compliant paid path does exist (non-ingestible hemp topicals, some retail and brand-awareness placements) we run it. What we don’t do is build your growth model on a channel that can revoke your account overnight.

Question 5

Do you display lab results and COAs?

Accepted Answer

Yes, as structured product data tied to the batch. Cannabinoid and terpene profiles as attributes rather than prose, potency and serving size in fields you can filter and merchandise on, contaminant and pesticide panels, and the COA linked to the actual lot the customer received, including the QR path from the package in their hand back to the right document. Batch-level traceability is also what makes a recall or a hold something you can execute instead of announce.

Question 6

Who owns compliance for labeling and claims?

Accepted Answer

Your regulatory and legal team owns what the claims say. We own the system that carries them: structured labeling fields (mg per serving, mg per unit, cannabinoid breakdown, warnings), per-state disclosure blocks that render by ship-to or by storefront instead of being pasted into templates by hand, disclaimers surfaced where the decision happens, and review and UGC moderation so a customer’s medical claim doesn’t end up published on your PDP. When the rules change in a state, you change the rule once, not forty templates.

Question 7

Do you integrate with dispensary POS, menus, and seed-to-sale systems?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Menu and POS integrations (Dutchie, Jane, Treez, Blaze, Meadow) built into your own storefront rather than dropped in as an unbranded iframe that contributes nothing to your SEO, plus real-time inventory, per-visit purchase limits, in-store pickup, curbside, and delivery windows with ID checks at handoff. On the back end that means seed-to-sale traceability (Metrc, BioTrack) and loyalty platforms like Alpine IQ and Springbig, so the storefront, the register, and the compliance record agree with each other.

Question 8

Do you build subscriptions and replenishment for CBD brands?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and in a consumable category it’s usually where the margin lives. Reorder cadence built around actual dosage and unit count instead of a fixed monthly box, pause, skip, and swap flows that keep customers from cancelling outright, and eligibility re-validated on every renewal so a customer who moves states doesn’t generate a shipment you can’t make. The hard part is billing continuity on a high-risk gateway, which is exactly why we build the payment failover first.

Question 9

Do you only work on Shopify Plus?

Accepted Answer

No, and in this category the platform question is decided for you more often than not. Shopify restricts a lot of what this vertical sells, so we build on BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and fully headless setups, and we recommend the platform around your product mix, your approved payment stack, and your compliance requirements rather than around a preference. Hemp topicals and accessories have more options than ingestibles or THC; the scoped proposal spells out the recommendation and the reasoning.

Question 10

How long does a typical cannabis or CBD build take?

Accepted Answer

It depends on scope, but you’ll see something real fast: first wins on the age gate, the checkout and payment path, and COA and potency data on the PDP inside 30 days, with most full builds landing in the 3–6 month range. Payment failover, state eligibility rules, and POS or seed-to-sale integrations add time; a focused hemp-topical storefront rebuild moves faster. We scope it precisely in the free site audit before kickoff, so the timeline isn’t a guess.

Comparison criteria	RMG	Cannabis-tech platform vendor	Generalist ecommerce agency	Cannabis marketing shop
Vertical fluency	Restricted-category commerce, end-to-end	Knows the menu, not the rest of the store	Same playbook every vertical	Knows the channels, not the platform
Age gating & verification	Tiered gating, verification at checkout, crawlable	Whatever their widget does	Off-the-shelf modal	Not their scope
State eligibility rules	Per-product, per-state, surfaced before the cart	Their rules engine, their limits	Shipping-zone workaround	Not their scope
High-risk payments	Redundant gateways + decline recovery	One integration, no failover	Whatever the gateway supports	Out of scope
COA & potency data	Structured attributes, batch-level, QR-linked	PDF upload field	Content page at best	Copy on a landing page
Acquisition without paid social	SEO, programmatic, affiliate, email + SMS	Not their problem	Rebuilds the same paid plan that got you banned	Strong on channels, blind to the storefront
Menu, POS & seed-to-sale	Integrated into your storefront, indexed and branded	Their platform only	Iframe embed and done	Not their scope
Engagement model	Tiered: build, scale, or rescue	License + implementation fee, forever	Project or retainer	Channel-by-channel retainer

The category
everyone else
says no to.

“Sorry. We can’t
ship to your state.”

An age gate that either everyone clicks through or a third of your traffic never gets past

Ship-to restrictions revealed at checkout instead of built into the catalog

Declined transactions logged as abandoned carts and never looked at again

Potency, cannabinoid profile, and serving size living in the description field

COAs as a folder of PDFs linked from the footer

A growth model that depends on channels which can revoke your account overnight

A dispensary menu dropped in as an iframe with none of your brand and none of your SEO

Per-state compliance copy pasted into templates by hand every time a rule changes

Lifecycle programs abandoned because someone said cannabis and SMS don’t mix

Every service that has to work inside
the restrictions, not around them.

A storefront that knows who’s allowed to buy what.

Potency as product data, not prose.

Checkout built for a processor that might say no.

Growth on channels nobody can switch off.

Cannabis & CBD ecommerce
runs on four numbers.

Age-gate pass-through

Payment approval rate

Owned-channel revenue share

Replenishment repeat rate

Show you the money.

Here are your other options.

There’s a lot more
to this story.

Here's what happens
after you fill out the form.

30-min
discovery call

Free site audit

Scoped
proposal

First wins inside
30 days

Get them out
of the way.

If cannabis and CBD isn't the only fit, try these.

Let's audit your storefront.

The category everyone else says no to.

“Sorry. We can’t ship to your state.”