The Flowery is a Florida-based medical cannabis dispensary.
Ecommerce businesses in highly regulated industries have to contend with a lot of hurdles, as Florida-based medical cannabis store The Flowery knows very well.
They came to MobiLoud to help ship a mobile app that would give them an owned channel they could use to cultivate their customer base and expand their business.
Learn how we helped them begin the next stage of their business by launching their own mobile app.
The Challenge
Because of the regulatory hurdles they have to deal with, and the complexities of their industry, the ecommerce side of The Flowery’s business has a lot of moving parts.
Their site is a custom-built headless WooCommerce site, which is essentially a web app rather than a static online store.
Their tech stack and setup allows them to do a lot of things that set them apart from other cannabis stores in their market, such as the ability for customers to store their medical card information and for the site to automatically pull up and validate this info whenever the customer makes a purchase.
So they would need a mobile app solution that worked with their unique tech stack.
Another key reason to do an app was push notifications.
The Flowery are trying to recreate the “Uber Eats experience” and give regular delivery updates to provide a great experience each time someone buys from them.
Email wouldn’t work for this, as it’s not “instant” enough. And they ran into problems with SMS, as mobile carriers would throttle them, due to the industry they’re in.
That left push notifications as the best option. Like a mainstream delivery app, they wanted something that could send notifications directly to the customer’s home screen to give them a direct line to their delivery status, to the minute.
For that, they needed an app.
And in the end, the greatest challenge was doing all this with minimal technical background. As their CEO told us:
“At the end of the day, The Flowery is not a tech startup. We're a factory. We're a cannabis company. We’re just leveraging technology.”
Companies like The Flowery usually don’t have mobile app development experience in-house, which means outsourcing development, which adds a new level of complexity.
That’s why a lot of ecommerce companies call MobiLoud to help.
The Solution
“I know there's other companies that do the same thing but only for Shopify, but you’re probably the only one that I found that does it for WooCommerce/WordPress.”
MobiLoud fit everything The Flowery needed. We were able to build an app with their complicated tech stack, letting them bring all their custom features into the app, which nearly any other app builder would struggle to do.
We also came with push notifications included out of the box, and handled all the work for them, letting their team’s focus remain on maintaining their web app.
Results
There was skepticism. Their CEO was unsure that the project would work out, and had a feeling that the app would not get app store approval and would die before going live.
“My main concern was just that I'm going to invest a lot of time in it and I want to make sure that it goes live. I don't want it to be a sunk cost, like you invest and invest and then it never goes live. I was super skeptical that we could get this out and that's why I honestly wasn't too invested in it because I didn't think we were going to get it approved.”
However, we were able to navigate all the app stores’ requirements and get their app up and running with no hitches at all.
We’ve helped them tweak their app to look and feel the way they want, even being able to add small touches to provide an experience unique to their website.
All this with no dev work from their team. We gave them more than just an app; we gave them a mobile app team that they can call on at any time.
It’s still early days for their app, and they’re in the very early stages of rolling it out to their customer list.
But it’s given them a new range of possibilities for the future direction of their business.
Launch Your App With MobiLoud Today
“The investment is minimal, and it's worth spending $700 and waiting two months to see if you can get an app. It’s the best value for money that you can get, no doubt, it's the fastest way to go to market.”
We did for The Flowery what we’ve done for more than 2,000 successful businesses - helped them ship an app in less than a month, without spending hundreds of thousands on development, without sacrificing key features from their website, and without adding a crippling maintenance load to keep the apps running.
If you want to do the same, and have your very own app in the app stores in as little as two weeks, get in touch with us today.
The Flowery is a Florida-based medical cannabis dispensary.
