Text-to-Order AI lets customers place orders with your dispensary directly over text messages, without downloading an app or visiting a website. A customer sends a message, and it reads your live Flowhub inventory to answer questions and build a cart from the conversation. Unlike a typical chatbot, it finishes the order itself instead of handing the conversation off to a human, and the result is a ready-to-fulfill order your team completes like any other. For a dispensary already juggling pickup, kiosk, and delivery orders, this becomes one more channel feeding the same workflow instead of a new system to manage.

No app is required, for either the dispensary or the customer. Customers place their order using the messaging app already installed on their phone, the same one they'd use to text a friend. That's a meaningful difference from ecommerce platforms that route customers to a separate website or require a dedicated app download before they can buy anything. Fewer steps between wanting a product and finishing an order generally means fewer people give up partway through.

Text-to-Order connects directly to your live Flowhub inventory, not a separate menu or a snapshot that updates on a delay. That means it never recommends a product that's already sold out or quotes a price that's changed since the last sync. This is a common frustration with third-party menu platforms that pull from your point of sale on their own schedule, sometimes falling out of sync with what's actually on the shelf. Because Text-to-Order reads inventory in real time, there's no separate system to keep updated or reconcile.

Conversation data is handled with care throughout the process. Customer phone numbers are masked down to the last four digits in reporting, and the content of a customer's messages isn't exposed in analytics or dashboards. That gives your team visibility into how the channel is performing, things like conversation volume and conversion, without exposing the private details of what a specific customer asked or ordered. For a category as sensitive as cannabis, where customers already have real concerns about how their information gets handled, that separation matters.

Cannabis marketing and messaging carry their own regulatory restrictions, which is part of why Text-to-Order runs on iMessage and RCS instead of standard SMS. Both encrypt conversations in transit, which supports handling customer messaging more safely than a standard text thread. Purchase limits and eligibility checks apply before any order is finalized, the same way they do for pickup, kiosk, and delivery orders elsewhere in Flowhub.

If a conversation goes quiet before a customer finishes ordering, Text-to-Order can send an automated follow-up message that brings them back to checkout. This works similarly to cart abandonment recovery on a typical ecommerce site, except the nudge arrives as a text instead of an email. It's meant to recover sales that would otherwise quietly disappear when someone gets distracted mid-conversation, without requiring a staff member to notice and follow up manually.

Yes, Text-to-Order requires Flowhub Ecommerce, either the Open Ecommerce or Native Ecommerce option, since it runs as a layer on top of that existing storefront and checkout rather than as a standalone product. If you're already using Flowhub Ecommerce, adding on Text-to-Order creates a new ordering channel without requiring you to rebuild anything. If you're not yet using Flowhub Ecommerce, our team can walk through what adding it would look like alongside Text-to-Order.