Have you been thinking about getting into the cannabis business? If so, the time do so is...now.

According to Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, “Cannabis might be the most disruptive force since Amazon.” It’s a booming, billion-dollar industry, and it’s already disrupting 23 other industries. Need we say more?

Cramer is right. Many companies and investors are already interested in this fast-growing industry. But it’s not just for big companies to take advantage of. Since cannabis legality in the United States is still in its early days, current and budding small business owners and entrepreneurs have a chance to get a part of these greens without being edged out by big companies.

But how? In this post, we’re sharing what we’ve noticed about money, mary jane, and Shopify and how you can leverage it to build a successful cannabis company online.

Beat the competition in the Cannabis industry by “out-teching” the established players

Cramer pointed to Amazon as the example of a disruptor. And rightly so. Amazon has disrupted many industries since its start in 1994--including book publishing, brick-and-mortar retail, and package delivery--and is now the second biggest (and wealthiest) company in the world. It is even bigger than Google and Microsoft. The only company above Amazon is Apple, which surpassed a market cap of one trillion dollars last year.

That said, all those companies mentioned (Google, Microsoft, and Apple) are disruptors. They didn’t become so big because they did what everyone else in their industry was doing. Instead, they changed the game completely, and it paid off for them, big time.

The common thread throughout most major industry disruptors is that they out-teched established companies. They focused on technological--usually digital--aspects to offer a better, more convenient option to consumers. Eventually, these once-small, “out-there” companies surpassed their immense competition--because their tech was better.

When it comes to Cannabis, there is fertile ground for disruption. Namely, digital disruption. And we’ve got the idea that e-commerce Cannabis might just be the next big thing.

Market your Cannabis company to Gen Z

Currently, the target audience of both e-commerce and the medical and recreational marijuana business is Gen Z and millennials. But in the next few years, Gen Z is going to be way more important for Cannabis companies.

According to Bloomberg, Gen Z is going to overtake Millennials this year by .5% in terms of population. It sounds like a little, but it amounts to 385 million people. That means that Gen-Z will be 32% of the world’s population.

Gen Z is now the biggest consumer base. They’re the next generation of the workforce, and what appeals to them will dictate what will be appealing in the future.

Especially when it comes to e-commerce and new digital tools, Gen Z is far quicker to adapt. Millennials witnessed technology grow, but Gen-Z grew up with the technology. Gen-Z people are the most tech-savvy of all the generations. E-commerce was aimed towards Millennials, but Gen-Z made it ubiquitous. The same goes for social media, the Internet, and, yes, cannabis.

In fact, Gen Z may just make cannabis bigger than beer. There is a definite difference between the lifestyle of Millennials and Gen-Z when it comes to their vices. Millennials prefer the buzz of alcohol and tobacco while Gen-Zers get lit with cannabis.

Also, there are multiple ways to consume cannabis for recreation. You have oils, pills, vapes, pens, lotions, edibles, etc. that make cannabis portable and not disruptive when consuming.

Lastly, cannabis also has a big market for medical use. CBD and all its forms have a very large demand and is projected to grow up to 107% this year.

Launch your tech-savvy, cannabis e-commerce business on Shopify

To stand out in the burgeoning cannabis industry, you should lean toward cutting-edge digital technology and e-commerce. But it’s hard to do that without much technical knowledge. Thankfully, we have Shopify to help us.

Shopify has worked with the cannabis industry since Cannabis was legalized and commercialized last year in Canada. Shopify’s easy-to-use e-commerce platform may have contributed to Canada becoming the largest legal marijuana marketplace in the world in such a short period of time.

Shopify has also been working with Aurora Cannabis since last year, one of the leading cannabis companies and they’ve also recently worked with Ample Organics, a seed-to-sale company based in Canada.

You can comfortably say that Shopify is one of the few e-commerce platforms that have tenure in the cannabis industry.

Not only that, Shopify upholds the direct-to-customer model. This brings the power back to entrepreneurs and evens the playing field with large companies.

Aside from just providing the platform, Shopify provides tools, services, and support to make a small business capable of anything the market needs.

They offer payment systems, shipping and even cash advances for your capital. As Harley Finklestein, COO of Shopify, said in an interview with Jim Cramer: “We are always trying to find economies of scale to help democratize the entire business process for these small businesses.”

Shopify provides everything you need for a small business, especially for a small cannabis business. Loren Padelford, VP and GM at Shopify, said to Betakit in an interview, “Ensuring our customers can not only legally sell their products, but also track[ing] and manag[ing] those products from seed-to-sale is critical for the safe development of the medical and recreational cannabis industry.”

In short, we think Shopify will be the perfect platform for your cannabis store. Not only are they ideal for small businesses without huge teams or budgets, they also have the tools, experience, and knowledge specific to the cannabis industry.

Go green

We are living in a very progressive time. Ten years ago, the cannabis industry looked a lot different in the United States and most developed countries (because for the most part, it was illegal in every form). Now, cannabis is being accepted as a normal part of society.

At the same time, the digital revolution and Ecommerce has drastically changed the way we buy everything and anything. Taken together, e-commerce and cannabis make quite the disruptor.

And, the cannabis industry is only going to get bigger as more and more countries legalize it. The growth of e-commerce isn’t slowing down anytime soon. It’s time to go green and dab on them haters.