Loyalty software for Ontario cannabis retailers on Greenline

Greenline retailers get a loyalty card that lives in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, points that accrue from the real Greenline ticket, and rewards that apply at checkout without a separate app. Greenline is a cannabis retail point of sale, or POS, built for Canadian dispensaries and covering inventory, sales and regulatory reporting. Sticky Cards subscribes to its event stream rather than polling on a timer, so an order, a refund or a loyalty update lands in Sticky Cards in real time.

A wallet pass is a real Apple Wallet or Google Wallet card, issued through Apple's PassKit and Google's loyalty card APIs, that installs from a web link with no app store download (Apple Developer, Wallet Passes, Google Wallet, loyalty cards). Wallet push is a notification sent to that pass over Apple and Google notification rails rather than through a mobile carrier, which means no per-message carrier fee.

The Canadian market is large enough for this to matter. Statistics Canada put seasonally adjusted sales at Canadian cannabis retailers at 506.8 million dollars in June 2026, from 501.3 million in May 2026, in the monthly retail trade release dated 21 August 2026 (Statistics Canada, Table 20-10-0056-02). That is a steady, mature market where the growth has to come from the customers a store already has. Retention is where the room is: Headset's retailer panel puts average cannabis brand retention at 34.0 percent of tracked category customers, with a median of 32.6 percent, as of July 2026 (Headset, Cannabis Brand Loyalty).

Ontario cannabis retailers work under two layers of rule, and a loyalty program has to sit inside both. The first is the Registrar's Standards for Cannabis Retail Stores issued by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, whose section 6.0 governs advertising and promotions by authorised stores (AGCO, Registrar's Standards, section 6.0). The second is the federal Cannabis Act, which restricts the promotion of cannabis and cannabis accessories except in narrow permitted forms, including informational promotion directed at a person who is 18 or older and who has asked for it (Cannabis Act, S.C. 2018, c. 16, section 17).

On top of those sits Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, usually shortened to CASL, which requires consent before a commercial electronic message is sent, an identification of the sender, and a working unsubscribe mechanism in every message (CRTC, Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation). CASL is the reason a Canadian loyalty list is built on express opt-in rather than on an assumption, and the reason the record of that opt-in matters as much as the list itself.

Sticky Cards records every opt-in with its timestamp and its source, carries no advertising copy on the pass itself, and lets a customer remove the pass at any time. Age verification is part of enrollment. None of that replaces your own compliance review, and a retailer should read section 6.0 against its own signage and offers before a campaign goes out.

Earning and redemption are configured once, against Greenline's own discount engine, and then run without a budtender lookup. In-POS redemption means the reward applies as a discount in the register the staff are already using, rather than the customer opening an app and the staff member typing a code across.

The setup is run end to end by a Sticky Cards implementation specialist: Greenline credentials, webhook wiring, reward rules, pass design and a staff session. Every event is signed, acknowledged and replayable from the last cursor, so a failure does not create a duplicate order or a missing customer.

One Sticky Cards program can run across several provinces, with the creative and the compliance settings controlled per location. Promotion rules are provincial, so a store in Ontario and a store in Alberta can share a customer list and a card design while sending different offers.

That per-location control is the practical difference between one national program and a separate program per province. Segments rebuild on every POS event rather than on a nightly batch, so a customer who shops two of your stores is one record with one balance.

Moving to Sticky Cards means the list, the loyalty balances and the creative are migrated for you, and you stay on the current tool until the new one is sending. Migration from SpringBig, Alpine IQ or a general-purpose email provider is run by the implementation specialist, and balances are reconciled against the source export before launch.

Two questions are worth putting to any vendor in this category, including this one. What happens to accrued balances on the way in, and what happens to your customer data if you leave. Sticky Cards exports on request and deletes on termination (Sticky Cards security).