Powered By the 2025 Cannabis Shopper Experience Report by Sweed
From Novelty to Normalization
Almost 30 years after California legalized the sale of medical cannabis through Proposition 215, the novelty of legally and safely buying weed at a regulated dispensary has worn off. Cannabis is now a regular part of life, used by adults in varying stages, walks of life, demographics, and more.
As a result, customers’ tolerance for fragmented, impersonal operations has significantly decreased. Customers are now looking for their dispensary to provide an equal experience to the traditional retail operations they’re accustomed to, like grocery stores, restaurants, and beauty shops.
Convenience and personalization are the first pieces that increasingly diverse, digital, and discerning customers look to measure in their dispensary experience. Each stage of the buyer journey offers an opportunity for dispensaries to optimize using the right mix of experience, data, and AI.
To better understand what today’s cannabis consumers value most, Sweed partnered with Wired Research and Oak PR on the 2025 Cannabis Shopper Experience Report. The study surveyed 955 U.S. adults (21+, nationally representative) to uncover how cannabis customers think, shop, and what they expect from dispensaries.
Read the press release here.
Grow Your Reach: Be Easy to Find
Customers can’t discover a dispensary they can’t find, whether that’s online, on social media, or even at the physical location. Visibility can be achieved through SEO, Instagram, and clear signage; however, the real impact comes when these elements clearly represent your business’s unique brand, to set the scene for customers before they even enter your store.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 74% of cannabis shoppers choose dispensaries based on location.
- 53% of cannabis shoppers prefer locally owned stores.
- 41% of cannabis shoppers discover new shops via word of mouth or referrals.
Understanding these preferences can help you make small, but impactful decisions about your business, such as optimizing local SEO and Google listings, leveraging referral programs and community partnerships, and encouraging QR code sharing or social mentions for organic reach.
Sweed supports dispensaries by providing geo-targeted marketing and referral tools that help businesses get discovered at the exact moment of purchase intent.
Elevate the Experience: Win the First Impression
The first step in delivering the ideal retail experience is understanding your customers’ wants, needs, and preferences. This goes beyond just having the products they want, and includes customer and staff interactions, how they browse and shop, and type of experience desired.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 60% of shoppers prefer to browse independently.
- 71% of shoppers say product education influences what they buy.
- 49% of shoppers report feeling overwhelmed by too many choices.
- 88% of shoppers say budtenders shape their purchase decisions, and 85% would return for knowledgeable staff.
While dispensary operators can’t do everything perfectly, honing in on the key aspects of the customer experience that have the most impact and increase sales is vital to creating a loyal customer base that keeps coming back.
Combining self-guided discovery with expert budtender support, using digital displays, AI assistants, or educational kiosks to simplify exploration, and training budtenders to recommend and upsell confidently can go a long way.
Sweed takes it a step further, offering tools such as AI-powered product recommendations at checkout and register-based budtender recommendations to make every interaction smarter.
Speed Up Sales: Simplify the Purchase
As a result of the increased normalcy of cannabis, customers want to purchase cannabis with the same ease and speed they purchase and pick up other household items like groceries, prescriptions, and alcohol. And, as a result of continuous competition, bottlenecks and lengthy checkout processes often mean missed revenue and lost customers.
It’s important to note these expectations don’t just apply to your physical store, but also span every place your customer interacts with your business, including your online menus, pickup, and delivery.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 43% of cannabis shoppers prioritize speed and ease.
- 68% of cannabis shoppers say a clear online menu is critical.
- 39% of cannabis shoppers choose dispensaries with express pickup.
- 75% of cannabis shoppers want one-click reordering, 72% want to pre-order online, and 67% say delivery options are essential.
It’s clear winning dispensaries aren’t the ones with the most bells and whistles, but rather those that prioritize creating a seamless checkout experience and implement flexibility across channels.
This is achieved through multiple fulfillment options (pickup, delivery, pre-order), maintaining live and updated menus, and using loyalty logins to auto-fill preferences and cart history.
That’s why Sweed offers real-time inventory syncing and integrated loyalty at checkout to ensure every transaction is fast, consistent, and accurate.
Fulfill with Consistency: Deliver Confidence
As more dispensaries open nationwide, operators are required to compete on customer experience and consistency. Because product selection is often similar across dispensaries, operators need to differentiate themselves through the experience they provide and their ease or purchase.
Therefore, trust is gained and lost through accurate, reliable, and transparent fulfillment.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 47% of cannabis shoppers cite order accuracy as key to retention.
- 61% of cannabis shoppers want visibility into loyalty points and loyalty.
- 3 in 4 cannabis shoppers expect mobile order updates.
Dispensary teams are only as reliable as the tools they are given, especially with such a high retail turnover rate for budtenders. This means that implementing technology that sends branded order confirmations and delivery alerts, ensures loyalty tracking is visible online and in-app, and establishes audit fulfillment workflows to remove friction, is essential.
Sweed’s real-time updates and integrated loyalty community let shoppers feel informed, valued, and in control.
Maximize Customer Value: Engage Between Visits
In a world with so many choices available, cannabis shoppers have endless options on when and where to buy. Dispensaries that can stay top of mind even after a shopper leaves, are the ones who are going to win big.
Imagine being the business customers think of first when asked by friends for a recommendation or when a customer’s weed stash runs low. Engaging with customers even when they aren’t in your store is the first step in capitalizing on these goals.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 69% of cannabis shoppers say they’d return if they signed up for a loyalty program.
- 55% of Gen Z cannabis shoppers expect behavior-based offers, but only 29% report receiving them today.
- 86% of cannabis shoppers say personalized recommendations drive return visits.
The best way to stay top of mind is by delivering the right insights, promotions, and messages at the right time. Accomplishing this requires more than guesswork, it takes tools and insights to help you understand your customers on a deeper level.
Winning dispensaries use these tools to build behavioral triggers into their messages (e.g., “We noticed you loved X, here’s 10% off Y!”), segmenting by frequency, product preference, and spend tier, and rewarding engagement with dynamic loyalty milestones.
Sweed offers AI-driven segmentation and automated behavior-based campaigns to turn loyalty data into repeat revenue.
Drive Repeat Business: Close the Loop
Every interaction a customer has with your business, is a step in the customer journey, one that requires consistency and relevance to nurture a mutually beneficial relationship.
The best way businesses can nurture this journey is by creating consistent experiences for their customers that they can depend on.
2025 Sweed Cannabis Consumer Insights:
- 57% of cannabis shoppers leave after inconsistent experiences.
- 45% of cannabis shoppers would return more often if offers felt personalized.
- 1 in 3 cannabis shoppers churned from a dispensary they liked due to irrelevant outreach.
Understanding and then optimizing every place and moment your business interacts with customers is crucial in improving the customer journey and ensuring customers continue to cycle through a purchasing loop, instead of dropping off along the way.
Steps to optimize this process include auditing every customer touchpoint for consistency, using data to personalize communication across SMS, email, and in-store, and creating a cadence for repeat-customer outreach such as weekly nudges, monthly bundles, and loyalty celebrations.
Sweed’s built-in customer data platform unifies your customer data, and, with AI-driven smart nudges, helps ensure every shopper feels seen, remembered, and rewarded.
The Takeaway: How to Win the Modern Cannabis Shopper
The first step to winning today’s modern cannabis shopper is to understand how they have evovled and what they want.
The next step is to show up in consistent and impactful ways, where and when they want. To win at every step of the customer journey, dispensaries must:
- Be easy to find.
- Make shopping simple, relevant, and fast.
- Connect loyalty and personalization.
- Learn from behavior, then act on it.
Sweed’s intelligent all-in-one platform gives dispensaries the competitive edge they need to grow, empowering them to execute across the customer journey, from discovery to repeat purchase, seamlessly, intelligently, and at scale.
Interested in learning more? Request a demo with our expert team.
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