When it comes to cannabis, necessity isn’t just the mother of invention, it’s the driver of a whole new ecosystem.

While traditional e-commerce giants like Amazon and Shopify remain on the sidelines due to federal prohibition, the cannabis industry has forged ahead, developing an infrastructure all its own. Locked out of the mainstream, cannabis operators have created platforms to manage everything from online ordering and payments to compliance and logistics.

One of the companies at the forefront of this innovation is Jane Technologies, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in cannabis today. Co-founded by MIT graduate and Army veteran Socrates Rosenfeld, Jane powers over 35 million legal transactions annually and partners with thousands of dispensaries and brands across 39 U.S. states. From its AI-driven personalization engine to patented universal product catalogs and in-store kiosks, Jane has built a tech infrastructure tailored specifically for the complexities of cannabis retail. 

But Jane is only one piece of this broader puzzle. Aeropay, a Chicago-based fintech company, is taking aim at traditional payment rails. With Visa and Mastercard still unavailable to cannabis retailers, Aeropay developed its own bank-to-bank payment system. Their Aerosync technology connects more than 12,000 banks, offering merchants a compliant, cashless, and fee-free alternative to credit cards. 

Meanwhile, compliance technology is evolving, too. Metrc, the backbone of the regulatory cannabis supply chain, recently launched a serialized QR code system that enables item-level traceability for finished products from production to checkout. Consumers can see key product details such as COA’s, easily readable cannabinoid and terpene data, and supplemental product information directly sourced from the track and trace system. For brands and retailers, it reduces labeling labor, safeguards product authenticity and improves consumers’ trust in an industry where transparency matters.