A headless ecommerce platform that replaced Shopify across a growing cannabis franchise, from catalog to checkout to courier

Shopify was the bottleneck. Every new integration meant another app, another monthly fee, another vendor who couldn't see what the other vendors were doing. So we ripped it out and built a central API hub in AdonisJS that owns all integration logic.

COVA POS for catalog and inventory. Leafly and Uber Eats for marketplace orders. Moneris for PCA compliant payments (one of few processors that supports cannabis retail in Canada). CIGO for delivery dispatch. Klaviyo for email marketing. Meilisearch for product search. The hub sits in the middle and makes sure they all talk to each other. One backend, one source of truth, one team responsible for the whole thing.

Kindling operates multiple stores across different cities. The conventional approach would be URL-based routing: shopkindling.ca/toronto, shopkindling.ca/hamilton. That fragments SEO, breaks shared links and creates maintenance overhead.

Instead, we built cookie-based store resolution. The system detects the user's location through IP, geolocation or manual postal code input and resolves the first three characters of the postal code against a store mapping table. If a customer changes their delivery address mid-checkout and it maps to a different store, a confirmation modal appears and the cart switches atomically. No URL changes. No broken links. One storefront that behaves like many.

Most headless CMS setups treat content and commerce as separate worlds. We built Storyblok components that are aware of both the product catalog and the user's location. A Hero component can feature products from the customer's nearest store. A Collection component renders location-specific inventory. A FeaturedProduct block pulls live pricing and availability.

Content authors build editorial pages (including a full magazine-style blog) without touching code. The CMS enforces brand guidelines through component constraints, supports A/B testing on any component, and publishes with draft preview and webhook-driven revalidation. No deployments needed.

Cannabis product catalogs are big, messy and full of strain names that customers only half remember. Shopify's default search couldn't handle it. Typos returned nothing. Partial queries returned everything. Filters were slow enough that people gave up.

We dropped in Meilisearch and indexed the full COVA catalog with typo tolerance, synonyms and faceted filtering. Search results come back in under 50ms. Customers can type 'bleu dream' or 'blue drm' and still land on what they want. Filters for THC range, price, category and brand update instantly. The whole thing runs on the hub, so inventory counts and pricing stay accurate to the store the customer is actually shopping from.

Cannabis checkout in Canada is regulated, complicated and usually painful. Age verification, delivery windows, store-specific inventory holds, PCA compliant payment processing. Most platforms bolt these on as afterthoughts and it shows.

We built a single-page checkout that handles all of it without making the customer feel any of it. Moneris processes the payment. CIGO gets the delivery dispatch. COVA locks the inventory. The hub coordinates the sequence so nothing falls through, and the customer sees one clean flow from cart to confirmation. On mobile (where most of Kindling's traffic comes from) checkout completes in under 60 seconds.