These are the metrics and owned-site assets I use to see how dependent a cannabis retailer is on a marketplace, instead of blending it into one online revenue number.

What counts as owned ecommerce?

Owned ecommerce is any order that starts on the retailer's own domain, organic landing pages, direct traffic, email, or loyalty, anywhere the retailer controls the customer path and the attribution. Marketplace ecommerce starts on a third-party menu or discovery platform, even when it gets fulfilled inside the retailer's POS.

Which dependency ratio should be tracked?

The primary ratio is owned-site revenue share:

owned_site_revenue_share = owned_site_online_revenue / total_online_revenue

The inverse is marketplace dependency:

marketplace_dependency_ratio = marketplace_online_revenue / total_online_revenue

How should marketplace margin be calculated?

Report marketplace revenue net of the costs the channel creates: commissions, marketplace-specific discounts, ad spend, and any operational cost you carry only because you are on the platform.

marketplace_net_revenue = marketplace_gross_revenue - commissions - marketplace_discount_cost - marketplace_ad_spend
marketplace_net_margin = marketplace_net_revenue / marketplace_gross_revenue

What is the channel risk?

Lean on a marketplace and you take on whatever the platform decides next: commission changes, ranking changes, ad bids climbing, competitors buying placement above you. You also lose much of the customer relationship, since first-party attribution gets weaker and none of that SEO builds up on your own domain. It is fine to run, but treat it as rented demand and price it that way.

What data fields are required?

The order record has to hold where the order came from and how it was fulfilled: acquisition source, landing page, marketplace and campaign identifiers, customer and order IDs, gross revenue, discount and commission amounts, fulfillment location, and whether the customer is a repeat. Miss the source at write time and marketplace and owned-site orders collapse into one blended number you can't split later.

order_id
customer_id
channel
source_platform
campaign_id
landing_page
gross_revenue
discount_amount
commission_amount
store_id
is_repeat_customer

Which owned assets reduce dependency?

Owned ecommerce runs on pages you can index and keep up to date:

  • Location pages. Address, hours, phone, service area, live menu link, and structured store data.
  • Indexable product pages. Crawlable product URLs with stable titles, availability state, price, image, and structured data where supported.
  • Category pages. Pages for high-intent categories such as flower, edibles, vapes, pre-rolls, concentrates, and tinctures.
  • Brand pages. Pages for high-demand brands stocked by the retailer.
  • Email and loyalty capture. First-party opt-in linked to purchase history and customer preferences.
  • Accurate local listings. Consistent name, address, phone, hours, and store status across citations.

How should dependency be reduced?

Keep the marketplace where it brings in profitable new customers, but pull repeat orders back onto channels you own. Track by channel where the first and second orders came from, the discount they took, and lifetime value. Use your own merchandising, email, loyalty, and local SEO to move repeat buyers off the rented discovery.

What is the operating target?

You are not trying to get marketplace revenue to zero. You want a mix where the marketplace brings in demand you can measure and still profit on, while your own domain takes a growing share of repeat purchases and branded local search.