Introduction to Jane Roots
Jane Roots is a headless e-Commerce solution that enables our partners to build custom applications that integrate with the Jane ecosystem. This document is intended to provide an overview of how Roots works, and briefly discuss what you will need to do to integrate headless e-Commerce into your dispensary’s website.
While Jane Roots is very powerful, and can apply to anyone who sells cannabis online, there are a few prerequisites for building on Jane Roots:
- Technical sophistication – Jane Roots is designed for a technically sophisticated audience. To be successful at implementing Roots, you will need to design and build your own web or mobile application. If you're not sure whether Jane Roots is appropriate for you, here are a few litmus test questions you should be able to answer:
- Do I already have a completed design I want to use, or do I have access to a designer who has built similar applications before? For more information on the types of interfaces you will need, see here.
- Do I have an internal engineering team, or have I worked with contract developers who can build fairly complex applications that interact with a variety of data sources?
- Do I know how I will deploy and host my application once it is built?
- What are my KPIs and how will I measure them?
Even if you lack the technical sophistication required to build your own menu using Roots, we work with a number of vendors who are able to build you a menu on top of Roots. Please reach out to us for more information. - Relationship with Jane – Jane Roots is limited to Jane partners. If you're already a Jane partner (e.g. you're a dispensary using Jane's eComm solutions; you're a brand using Jane's brand embed solution), feel free to contact your partner success rep, and we'll get the conversation going. If you're not already a Jane partner, reach out!
The traditional method for integrating Jane with a dispensary website is by using our embed script, which renders our storefront in an iFrame on your site. The entire customer flow lives in that frame, including the menu and the checkout flow. Any post-checkout emails or text communication with the customer are also handled by Jane.
While this is easy to setup, some of our dispensary partners want to build a custom solution that truly matches their brand experience. Roots enables you to build a completely custom menu, and also allows other parts of the customer experience to be customized.
The Roots flow has four main components.
- 1.The menu, which you will build using a combination of Jane Roots APIs.
- 2.(optional) Login via AWS Cognito or our login system, which enables personalized features to be provided to the consumer.
- 3.Checkout via an embedded checkout flow, which requires interaction with an embedded iFrame.
- 4.(optional) Post-checkout interactions with the customer, such as showing them their order status and allowing them to check in for curbside pickup. We will go into these steps in more detail below and in future sections.
Your menu is where your users go to see what products you have in your store and add them to their cart. In implementing the Jane Roots menu, you will pull data from our Algolia indices as well as potentially from our APIs. The Algolia indices are faster and more scalable, and will allow you to quickly search our catalog and retrieve product details. In some cases you may also need to use our product APIs to retrieve information not present in Algolia or to perform updates.
If you want to implement more sophisticated functionality, such as allowing customers to leave reviews you will need to use our APIs. These will be described in more detail later.
When customers are registered and logged in, they will be able to save their shipping and billing information, see their order history, use payment systems, and receive user group discounts (e.g. Veterans, Senior Citizens, etc…). You can also use CRM to interact with users who have made purchases.
We offer two different methods to allow users to login. The first is to use our built-in authentication. This is built directly into the embedded shopping cart, and uses Jane’s user table.
If you would like to have separate users for your dispensary, we will provision an AWS Cognito User Pool that you can use. You will need to implement your own registration and login on your site, although you can use the Amplify library to make this easier. You can easily integrate Cognito with Google Sign-In.
When your customers are ready to make a purchase, it is time to direct them to our embedded checkout flow. Jane has already implemented the checkout process, which means that most of the heavy lifting is already done. You will just drop our embed script into your page, and you can then send us the cart payload and let the user complete their order. As users interact with the cart, Jane will send callbacks so that you will know when users add or remove items from their cart.
After the customer has successfully checked out, you may want to have some post-checkout interaction, such as an updating order status page as the status of the order changes. We offer a number of different webhooks that make this easy.
A number of our partners have created beautiful sites using Jane Roots. Here are some of them:
If you are feeling confused or overwhelmed after reading this document, don't panic!! We are happy to work with you to help clarify these details and to work through the process of designing and building a menu that perfectly matches your brand. Additionally, Jane knows a number of partners who are experienced with Roots and can work with you to help turn your vision into reality. Please reach out to us for more information.
Last modified 1mo ago