Anyone who has sold into retail understands the offline version of this. Where a product sits on a shelf changes how much of it moves. Eye level outperforms the bottom row. An endcap outperforms the middle of an aisle. A vendor day, where a brand representative is in the store talking to customers, moves more product in an afternoon than a week of sitting quietly in the case.
Those arrangements are negotiated. They are part of the relationship between a brand and a retailer, and everyone involved treats them as normal commerce.
The online store is a shelf too. Same scarcity, same positioning effects, same negotiation. It is just less visible, so fewer people on either side have thought carefully about it. This is written for both sides: what a brand is buying, and what a retailer is selling.
The online shelf and where it is scarce
A retailer’s menu has a small number of high-attention positions and a long tail of everything else. The first row of the first carousel a shopper sees. The featured slot on a category page. The block that appears when someone searches a product type rather than a specific item.
Those positions are finite in exactly the way physical shelf space is finite. Everything cannot be featured. So a decision gets made about what occupies them, and that decision is either arbitrary, made once and never revisited, or it is a commercial arrangement. Sponsored product carousels are the mechanism for making it the third thing.
Mechanism one: sponsored product carousels
A sponsored carousel is a placement on a retailer’s storefront where specific products appear in a prominent position, marked as sponsored, arranged through the retailer.
For a brand, this is the closest online equivalent to an endcap. The placement puts the product in front of shoppers who are already in a buying context at a store that already carries it, which is a narrower and better-qualified audience than most advertising reaches. It also has the advantage of being available at all, which matters more in this category than it would in another.
For a retailer, it is inventory in a different sense of the word. The store already has traffic. Those positions already exist and are already being filled by something. Formalising them turns an editorial decision into a revenue line without adding a single visitor.
Terms are set between the two parties. This article does not state rates, splits or figures, because those are commercial arrangements between a brand and a retailer rather than anything published here.
Mechanism two: ad network placements via Surfside and Jane
Beyond a single retailer’s own storefront, placements can run through ad networks built for this category. Buddy storefronts connect to Surfside and Jane for this.
The distinction from the first mechanism is scope. A sponsored carousel is one retailer’s store. A network placement can reach across participating retailers, which means a brand negotiating once can appear in more than one place, and a retailer joining once can be matched with demand it never had to go and find.
The reason this infrastructure exists in cannabis specifically is worth stating. The mainstream ad platforms are closed to this category, so the ordinary route of buying attention is unavailable. Networks operating inside the category are one of the few remaining ways for a brand to reach shoppers at scale, which raises their importance relative to how they would rank in another industry. Ad monetization covers the retailer-side setup.
Mechanism three: vendor days, booked properly
The vendor day never went away. What changed is how it gets arranged, which for most operators is still a text message chain and a shared calendar somebody forgets to update.
Booked through the storefront, it becomes a process: the brand sees which stores and which dates are open, requests one, and the retailer approves it. The double-booking disappears, both sides have a record, and the event can be promoted on the store’s own pages rather than relying on foot traffic to discover it.
For a brand this is often the highest-value placement available, because a conversation with a budtender who then recommends the product for the next three months outlasts any single day of sales. For a retailer it is a booking system for something already being done informally. In-store and local marketing covers how it is run.
How to approach it from each side
If you are a brand: the retailers most worth approaching are the ones already selling your product, because there is a track record to point at. Come with something specific, a product and a reason and a period, rather than a general request for visibility. And accept that the placement only converts if what it leads to is worth arriving at, which means the product presentation on the retailer’s site has to be good. See the brands overview.
If you are a retailer: your traffic has value and you are almost certainly giving it away for free. The brands you carry benefit from prominence, some of them will pay for it, and formalising that costs you no additional visitors. The constraint to hold onto is trust. Sponsored positions should be labelled, the products in them should be ones you would stand behind, and the shopper experience comes first, because the traffic is the asset and it is the thing you would be spending. See the retailer overview.
Advertising and promotional rules vary by state and constrain what these placements may say. This article is informational and is not legal advice; confirm current requirements with your state regulator or your own counsel.