SHOPIFY HELPS RETAILERS SURVIVE DAY ONE.

Several provincial governments and cannabis companies may have Shopify

Inc. to thank, at least in part, for a relatively smooth first day of legal recreational marijuana sales in Canada.

“Shopify stores experienced no outages,” said Brad Goble, the Ottawa-based ecommerce company’s director of regulated industries, in an emailed response.

When it came to selling marijuana online, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Prince Edward Island all turned to Shopify to provide them with e-commerce assistance.

Shopify’s point-of-sale system was also used for Canada’s first-ever sale of recreational pot, which the company said was rung up one minute after midnight in Newfoundland (local time).

Goble said Shopify had been working with governments and licensed producers and private retailers throughout the year to prepare for cannabis sales. And on Wednesday, he added, the company “saw an average of over 100 transactions per minute across the country.”

“In the first 12 hours of legalized cannabis sales, we saw millions of visitors to the stores with tens of thousands of transactions,” Goble said. “In the first 24 hours, we expect hundreds of thousands of orders. In the first week, we expect millions of orders.”

If sales forecasts are borne out, the cannabis market could present some opportunity for Shopify. In one projection, Deloitte estimated earlier this year that sales of now-legal recreational cannabis could be worth as much as $4.34 billion by 2019.

Several pot companies are already using Shopify to help them with sales as well.

“Tweed (owned by Smiths Falls, Ont.-based Canopy Growth Corp.) and CanniMed (owned by Albertabased Aurora Cannabis Inc.), two of the world’s largest licensed producers, use Shopify to sell cannabis online and easily integrate with other solutions to stay compliant with strict government regulations,” boasts a pot-centric webpage of Shopify’s.

Goble said that Shopify is also “powering licensed retailers,” such as National Access Cannabis Corp. and Delta 9 Cannabis Inc., both of which were opening up brick-and-mortar stores in Winnipeg on Wednesday, according to press releases.

Shopify chief operating officer Harley Finkelstein told a conference in Boston in August that the reason the company had been so successful in winning cannabis-related government contracts in Canada was because “we’ve created a product that is very easy to use, very scalable, but also incredibly nimble.”

“So, you don’t need to have a meeting about changing some portion of your site because new legislation came out,” he said, according to a Bloomberg transcript.

Shopify also introduced a Canadian infrastructure product that Goble says “is available on request for qualified merchants with strict data locality requirements.”

“Our engineering, privacy, and data teams worked to ensure the safety and security of customer data and a seamless buying experience,” he said.

Indeed, the main difference between the cannabis-related e-commerce stores and those of non-cannabis ones has to do with the data of the customers frequenting them.

“While our engineering, privacy, and data teams made quite a few changes, a predominant change to our infrastructure was fencing off parts of the system so that data is stored in our Canadian infrastructure,” Goble noted.

Shares of Shopify closed at $178.89 in Toronto on Wednesday, down 5.3 per cent.

But the company’s cannabis-related services still may have helped make one prominent customer proud: Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

In Ford’s province, brickand-mortar cannabis stores are not expected to open until next spring. So for now, the ecommerce site for the government-owned Ontario Cannabis Store (which is supported by Shopify) is the only place that would-be recreational smokers can go for weed.

Ford said Wednesday in the Ontario legislature that the province’s cannabis store “handled well over 38,000 orders last night.”

“Matter of fact, Ontario’s one of the only provinces that are ready,” Ford said. “They stayed up all night, working to fulfil the orders, and I’m very, very proud of them.”

OVER 100 TRANSACTIONS PER MINUTE ACROSS THE COUNTRY.