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Placing an Order
This is the walkthrough of a complete purchase. Individual steps have their own pages; this one shows how they fit together.
1. Choose how you are receiving it
Before the catalogue can price anything properly it needs to know how the order will reach the shopper. Batch stores support three methods, and a brand may offer any combination:
- Pickup — collect from a store or dispensary
- Delivery — brought to an address, usually within a radius of a location
- Shipment — shipped conventionally
This choice drives what happens later. Pickup skips the delivery address step entirely; delivery and shipment require one.
2. Fill the cart
Add items and adjust quantities. The cart holds ordinary products, bundles, and where the store offers them, custom or configured products.
Carts survive across visits for signed-in shoppers, because the cart is kept against the account rather than the browser alone.
3. Start checkout
Checkout is a series of steps with a progress indicator across the top. Completed steps can be revisited by clicking back to them; steps ahead cannot be skipped.
The steps are assembled to fit the order — a store does not show a step it does not need. In practice:
| Step | Appears when |
|---|---|
| Contact / user details | Always |
| Identification | The store requires a government or patient ID |
| Delivery address | The method is delivery or shipment |
| Payment | The store has payment options enabled |
A pickup order at a store with no ID requirement is therefore a notably shorter checkout than a delivered order at one that has.
4. Identify yourself, if asked
Where the identification step appears, it must be completed before the order can proceed. See Age and ID verification.
5. Give a delivery address
For delivery and shipment. Saved addresses can be reused; new ones can be added during checkout. Delivery is usually limited to a radius around the fulfilling location, so an address outside it will be refused.
6. Apply anything that reduces the total
Before paying, this is the moment for:
- Promo codes
- Gift cards
- Points, where the store lets points offset a purchase
- Rewards earned from campaigns
7. Pay
Which providers appear depends on the store. See Payment methods.
8. Confirmation
The order gets a confirmation and an entry in order history, and payment is reconciled with the provider. If a payment provider takes the shopper away to its own page, they are returned to a confirmation route afterwards — that return trip is what records the payment against the order.
Do not close the tab mid-payment
Abandoning the browser during a redirect to a payment provider is the most common way for an order to end up in an unclear state — money may have moved while the order has not been updated.
After the order
Orders can be viewed in history, and depending on the store and the order's stage, cancelled or disputed.