What identity resolution means for a dispensary

By the Leafprint team at Gold Standard Solutions. Published October 31, 2026. General information, not legal advice.

Start with the problem

Think about the people who look at your website this week. Some are regulars checking the deals. Some are comparing you to the shop down the road. A few are new to the area and looking for somewhere to try. Most of them will leave without telling you anything about who they are.

Your analytics can count them, and your loyalty program knows the ones who joined. Everyone else is a blank. Identity resolution is an attempt to fill in part of that blank.

How it works

The process has two parts. First, a small script on your website called a pixel records activity: which pages someone viewed, what they clicked, where they came from, and technical details like IP address and device. Second, the platform compares what it recorded with information held by data providers. If it finds a likely connection, the visit gets linked to a profile that may include a name, email address, phone number, age range, and location.

The important word is likely. These are matches, not facts. Some are correct and complete, some are partial, and some visits never match anyone. Any vendor who tells you otherwise deserves careful questions.

What a dispensary can learn

The most useful findings tend to be simple. Are the people visiting your site actually located near your store? Which pages keep drawing them back? Do the visitors sent by a paid directory look like real shoppers, or does that traffic look thin?

Those are marketing questions you probably answer by instinct today. A profile view gives you some evidence. If you learn that a sponsorship brings almost nobody from your trade area, you have a good reason to reconsider it at renewal.

It can also show you opportunities on your own site. If identified visitors regularly read your first-time customer page but leave before joining loyalty, you know exactly which page to improve.

What it cannot do

It cannot give you a list of people you are free to contact. This trips up more retailers than anything else. A matched phone number does not mean that person agreed to get text messages from you, and marketing texts generally need written consent. We wrote a separate article on this because it matters so much.

It also cannot identify everyone, and it cannot tell you what someone bought in your store. It sees website behavior and whatever providers hold. Your point-of-sale and loyalty data remain the source for purchase behavior.

Privacy comes first

Your customers may be surprised that a website can do this, and cannabis is a sensitive category. Tell them. Your privacy policy should disclose that you use a visitor identification pixel, what it records, that visits may be matched to provider data, and how someone can opt out or request deletion.

Have counsel check your disclosure and your plans. State privacy laws differ, and whether a particular law applies depends on things like your size and what you do with the data.

Is it worth it for your store?

Three things decide that. First, traffic: a site with few visitors will not generate much to learn from. Second, follow-through: someone needs to look at the results and change something. Third, comfort: you and your counsel need to be at ease with how the data is handled.

You can estimate cost before you talk to anyone. Leafprint charges $0.25 per identified lead, and our calculator lets you try your own traffic numbers and match assumptions.

A short example

Picture a store that pays for a monthly local sponsorship and gets a healthy bump in visits. Analytics says the campaign is working. Then the team looks at the identified profiles from that source and sees that most are located well outside the area the store can realistically serve. Nobody got texted and no list was built, yet the store now has a good reason to renegotiate or redirect that money.

That is what a sensible use of this data looks like. It is quiet, it is a little boring, and it can pay for itself.

How to start small

Update your privacy policy, add the pixel, and let it collect data for a few weeks. Then pick one question to answer, such as whether your biggest traffic source is bringing local people. Act on what you find, then ask the next question. See how Leafprint works for what each step looks like in the portal, and what to do with identified visitors for what comes after.