Guide on Marijuana Delivery App Development: How to Create a Cannabis Delivery Application

To date, only two countries have fully legalized marijuana: Uruguay and Canada. In other countries, selling marijuana is prohibited or partially legalized. Nevertheless, in the US, many states are planning to legalize cannabis, and this will give a powerful impetus to the development of an entire industry. Let’s see how the marijuana market works and how to develop a marijuana delivery app.

If you are already interested in hiring the best dedicated custom development team to build you this type of app quickly and on budget, contact Interexy.

Why Is Medical Cannabis So Popular? Some Facts About Its Legalization

As you already understood, the most promising market is the United States: according to analysts, it will cost $100 billion by 2030. And by 2025, according to Global Market Insights, the medical marijuana market will be valued at about $59 billion.

As for Canada, in 2018, it became the first G7 country to authorize the use of marijuana federally. And in the United States, the process of its legalization has just started. So far, 35 states in the United States, including the District of Columbia, have legalized marijuana and allowed it to be used for medical reasons. Of these, 17 states can legally use marijuana for recreational use — without a doctor’s prescription.

And yes, with the coming of Joe Biden to power, the situation can become better in terms of legality: now the Democrats control both the White House and Congress, and it was this party that advocated the decriminalization of marijuana.These facts clearly indicate that if you hurry, you have a huge chance of becoming one of the leaders in this new niche of delivery apps. Therefore, do not hesitate — contact us to discuss the details of your project and learn how to make a marijuana delivery app.

General Market Overview

So far, at the federal level, the use and possession of marijuana in the United States are prohibited. The fact is that cannabis is known as a narcotic substance. The traditional way of using marijuana is smoking. However, now foods and oils that contain cannabidiol also gain popularity, and they do not negatively affect a person’s mental state.

In particular, cannabidiol preparations are prescribed as a treatment for patients suffering from chronic pain or seizures. That is why, according to New Frontier Data, the market of hemp-derived cannabidiol will grow from $390 million in 2018 to $1.3 billion by 2022.

Statistics never lie, and in general, it is obvious that many countries at the level of governing institutions are seriously interested in legalizing cannabis. So now is the time to launch your own cannabis delivery app. Write to us, and together we will discuss your business idea in detail.

How to Start a Delivery Service for Cannabis?

Before you start building a cannabis delivery app, you need to understand how legal it is in your area and what range of services you plan to offer to your target audience. Perhaps the only option available to you is selling hemp oil products. And of course, you should analyze existing industry leaders like Uber Weed, a medical cannabis delivery app. 

And now, let’s learn what to do at the following stages of the marijuana delivery app development process.

Analyze Your Target Audience

As we mentioned above, the correct choice of the target audience largely determines the future success of your project. For example, the delivery applications that provide customers with hemp oil-based products have a target audience that is fundamentally different from another one that corresponds to the applications that offer cannabis-based medicines. 

In general, since the market is fairly new, you should work hard when collecting data on the potential customers of this controversial product segment.

Choose Right App Technology

When you ask questions like: “How to make a cannabis delivery app?” you should first decide on your application’s business model. Specifically, you have two options:

Standard online store with the delivery feature. This type of application is practically no different from the food delivery applications we are used to. Usually, they are based on geolocation capabilities, allowing you to deliver the desired product to its customer in the shortest possible time. 
Alternatively, you can create something like a marketplace and provide access to it not only for buyers but also for sellers (in this case, you should develop two different types of user profiles; optionally, you can add a third type of user account — for couriers). In terms of monetizing such a business model, you can offer ad placement services, charge private sellers for renting a virtual trading space, or set the commissions for purchases.

Delivery application for the medical center. If you have your own medical center, you can expand the range of your services and sell cannabinoid-based drugs (of course, with the appropriate license). Thanks to the built-in delivery function and the integration of personal medical records data, you will make the service as comfortable as possible for patients.

Make a List of Key Features of your Marijuana Delivery App

We said earlier that three types of profiles (for buyers, sellers, and couriers) could optionally be implemented when creating a marijuana delivery app. Also, your administrator will need a separate account. Let’s talk further about what features could be present in each of them.

Or you can turn here to trusted mobile application development services to ease the whole process and take a huge step in this booming industry.

Features for buyers

Buyer’s profile. While making a marijuana delivery app, you have to create registration and authentication functions for existing users and provide for quick login to the account through the APIs of popular social networks. If we are talking about a medical center application, you will need to provide a patient’s ID check.
Product search and filters. Your app will probably have a relatively wide range of cannabis-based products, so having a search form is very important here. For even greater convenience for buyers, when you develop a cannabis delivery app, you should also have to provide filters for search results and the ability to sort products.
Shopping cart. The buyer should be able to adjust the set of goods, apply discounts and coupons, and change the delivery address. All these features must be present in the shopping cart.
Payment gateway. This tool is necessary for processing payments and, particularly, for the safe debiting of funds from the buyer’s bank card.
Geolocation. This feature is needed to find the current location of the buyer automatically. It helps couriers to navigate the area, and the company — to establish the logistics process. In fact, you just need to integrate one of the existing APIs with web maps, for example, the Google Maps API.

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Features for sellers

Seller account. Here, sellers can edit the name and description of their store and receive feedback from confirmed buyers.
Personal showcase. This is a tool for filling the store with goods. There must be a media uploader (for product images) and an HTML editor for product descriptions. Optionally, you can provide scripts for auto-tuning prices.
Orders panel. Here sellers can view completed and processed orders.

Features for couriers

Courier account. Here, couriers store personal data for communication, as well as reviews from other users of the application.
Task management. This panel helps the courier navigate the list of existing tasks and plan the working day. In particular, there should be options for accepting a new order, as well as changing its status to “In Progress” and “Delivered.”
Navigator. The GPS navigator shows the courier or driver where the buyers wait for their goods. This simplifies the process of delivering goods within large areas.

Admin panel features

Dashboards. Here, your admin can monitor the actions of all app users, optimizing the process of collecting analytics.
List of users. In this panel, the administrator sees a list of users with their data, including access data to their accounts.
List of goods. Here the administrator can see a list of products with current prices, quantity in stock, delivery restrictions, etc.
Order list. This section helps administrators in tracking the dynamics of orders.

Custom Marijuana Delivery App Development: Our Steps

And now, let’s learn how to create a cannabis delivery app. We will reveal our approach to such projects.

Drawing up an NDA. After receiving your completed contact form, our team will contact you as soon as possible by phone or Skype to find out the details of your business idea. This conversation will become the basis for concluding an agreement on the protection of your intellectual property.
Creating the architecture of the application. At this stage, our specialists create an architecture template for the future application, choose the tech stack and calculate the approximate cost of the project.
Completing a list of specifications for the project. After the template is approved, we draw up a detailed list of technical and non-technical requirements for the project. Developers will follow them during the cannabis delivery app development process.
The development process. In many cases (for example, when it comes to a startup), we start developing an MVP to launch it to the market as soon as possible with a minimum budget and get the first reaction of real users. Then, over time, we add the secondary functionality.
Release and transfer of access rights to the app to its owner. After end-to-end testing of the created application, we transfer all access rights to its owner and launch the product on the market. In addition, our clients often turn to us for scaling and technical support of an already working product.

Medical Cannabis Delivery App Development Cost

When calculating the approximate cost of a project, you should focus on the following factors:

Choice of mobile platforms: there are two most popular mobile platforms: Android and iOS, and at best, for maximum reach, you have to create an application for each of them. To save money, you can resort to cross-platform software development;
Deadline: depending on how soon your product should be presented to its target audience, the number of specialists involved in the project increases, which also affects its final cost;
Feature list: if your budget is tight, you might want to launch an MVP with only basic functionality. This is a good solution for startups. Then, over time, you will be able to add new features;
Integration with third-party solutions: integration of third-party APIs (for example, for displaying online maps, fast authentication, or online payments) also significantly affects the project’s cost.

If we talk numbers, the cost of such applications usually starts from $50-60 thousand USD and requires about six months of work. The more features you want — the bigger price will be.

Our Experience: Parsl Case Study

And now we will tell you about our experience in marijuana delivery app development.

We have already built Parsl app — a mobile solution for managing cannabis compliance and regulation enforcement. Our team created this app based on existing SaaS web-based products for end-to-end logistics automatization and item scanning.

As for the challenges we faced, we can mention a rather complex backend infrastructure and a high number of automatization functionality. Anyway, we successfully launched the product on the marketplace, and now it’s popular among the West Coast citizens.

If you’re reading these lines, you’re probably interested in healthcare mobile app development, including fitness, cannabis. Get in touch with our experts to get to know how much does it cost to create an app for marijuana delivery. Just fill out the contact form, and we will contact you to discuss your project.

Conclusion

We hope we helped you to understand how to build a marijuana delivery app. In any case, this is a rather complicated process, the details of which should be clarified with the managers with whom you will discuss your project. If you are looking for the right dedicated development team to bring your marijuana delivery business idea to life, contact Interexy. We will gladly take on your project, saving your budget and preserving the quality of the program code.