Hytiva Increases Throughput and Reduces Burn Rates at Dispensaries

Any retail executive knows the value of understanding customer behavior, especially inside a store, as well as the daily costs of staff, utilities, and space. Key performance indicators, such as customer throughput, time spent in-store, and burn rate (the total cost of operating the business for a given time period) are often cited in broad retail studies with the same reasoning assumed to be true for all retail. Within the cannabis industry, management positions are filled with retail and marketing professionals coming from traditional markets, bringing welcome expertise and many assumptions that Hytiva^®️ has proven false in 9 years of on-the-ground experience and analysis.

Problems with Customer Dwell Time Studies

One key performance indicator with a lot of attention is "Time Spent in Store." Often referred to as "Customer Dwell Time," many analyses conclude that customers spend more when they stay longer. This is often true for typical retail shopping experiences, where that time is mostly spent browsing, but Hytiva^®️ looks deeper to find that it isn't just how long the customer was there, but how that time was spent. Cannabis professionals, excited by broad studies of customer dwell time for typical retail, are often disappointed with poor results in their own stores due to unmeasured statistics and assumed values, such as time spent in checkout lines, the ease of finding a product, and more. The cannabis industry has more complexities, including:

• Compliance and service constraints that affect the browsing experience unlike any other retail sector.
• Wide-ranging customer knowledge levels affecting consumer attitudes and confidence.
• Customer flows that vary wildly between retail shopping experiences, entertainment, and traditional pharmacy counters.

Due to these limitations, customers are unable to touch or put products in a cart. Many products, like vape cartridges and prerolls, look the same, while the lab results of most products change constantly and are much more difficult to keep up to date in display cases. A customer's ability to educate themselves and make a buying decision is severely limited, making unassisted browsing in cannabis dispensaries a mere fraction of the time customers spend in store compared to the stores in traditional retail studies.

Increasing Throughput and Reducing Burn Rate with Quality Time

To solve these problems, Hytiva offers the Hytiva Technology Suite, a full suite of products designed for cannabis specific retail challenges. In addition to the time saved with its well known online ordering services for pickup and delivery, Hytiva also offers beautiful digital displays that automatically update lab and product information for customers from Hytiva's own point of sale (POS) and others, drawing a customer's interest and educating them with the information they need to make a buying decision quickly and easily. Hytiva's POS and mobile apps also make this data fully searchable by staff and customers from any interface to quickly find the products customers want and build orders from anywhere.
These solutions add up to the following in-store benefits:

• Reduced time for walk-in customers by 40% to 60% when customers have easier access to menu and product information via digital displays and a seamless in-store ordering process.
• Reduced time for pickup customers and greatly reduced wait time by combining online ordering with automation technologies for printing orders and customer arrival. Hytiva often saves 80% or more of the time spent in store for these customers.
• Higher quality time spent, with more attention focused solely on customer needs and meaningful interactions.
• Reduced staff time and store costs to close the sale with less square footage required to handle more customers, adding up to big savings quickly.

The Average Order Value Bonus

Hytiva mystery shoppers, engineers, and retail specialists visit stores often to measure the results of its solutions. From this data, Hytiva sees a consistent improvement in average order values based on the Hytiva services used:

• Walkin Order Averages increase by 20% to 32% ($50 to $66, for example).
• Pickup Order Averages outpace walkins by 23% to 38% (ranging between $80 and $95, for example).
• Delivery Orders consistently outpace pickup orders by an additional 24% to 56% (ranging between $110 and $140, for example). Hytiva's Delivery is the most profitable of any sale, especially at scale, because once orders are given to Hytiva drivers, staff time and store resources are reduced if not eliminated.

*Note : Percentages and Estimates based on average Hytiva data as of 03/01/2023

Conclusion

Whether your dispensary is a Hytiva client or not, your data is vital to your success and traditional retail studies cannot replace industry expertise. Hytiva develops its products and services with the cannabis industry as its sole focus, constantly adapting, measuring, and building ground-breaking new tools based on real experiences with Hytiva clients and customers.