Why We’re Boycotting Weedmaps
UPDATE: As if we needed another reason: according to a recent investigation by the LA Times, 62% of all dispensary reviews on Weedmaps are fake.
Originally posted May 22, 2012:
Recently we were informed of a new policy over at Weedmaps (initially via e-sales pitch and later by phone): if we didn’t agree to ditch our own very respected lab The Werc Shop and pay much higher rates to signup with SC Labs, their new partner in crime, they would remove all references to being lab-tested from our listing. They justified this anti-competitive and discriminatory behavior because they, in a flash of omniscience, decided that SC Labs is the only proper lab for cannabis testing. We refused to be blackmailed in this way, so WeedMaps censored our paid listing and deleted 85% of the text that was in our collective’s description. All under the guise of “wanting patients to have safe reliable medicine when someone advertises it on our site.” That’s so noble of them, but censoring our listing because we won’t use their own expensive lab to them is just bad karma. It’s also been going on for awhile apparently*. Boooo.
When I cancelled our paid listing, the aggressive sales rep threatened “you’ll be sorry.” (We’re still not sorry!) Weedmaps is full of old stale listings of collectives that closed down years ago. It does this to make small collective operators think there’s more competition than there actually is, so you feel pressured to pay more for a better listing. We call shenanigans on this bunk practice.
There’s also no moderation of customer reviews, so you might see that a competitor has 99 five star reviews, but when you go read them, it’s the same 5 star review copied and pasted 80 times. This probably happened because Weedmaps has a terrible user interface and the user wasn’t getting feedback that the review was submitted properly, so they kept pushing submit. Or, a dishonest operator just knows how to game the ridiculous system Weedmaps has created.
Please join us and the growing legions of people sourcing and getting their information on medicinal cannabis elsewhere. We really like Leafly.com but there are thousands out there to explore. Or, you can do it the old-fashioned way and google it.
*note: the post we linked to has disappeared, but a helpful visitor has provided us with a Web Archive link to where it is saved.
So we won’t get to know the percentages of the cannabis anymore?
You know, I found SCC on WeedMaps. I was wondering what was happening when I didn’t see a menu for ya on there anymore.
No, we will continue to have our medicine lab tested by the great people at Strain Genius and display our % on our menu, don’t worry!
I know, it’s terrible because they do have the most well-trafficked directory listing site for finding medical cannabis. They really do have a monopoly and are clearly using it to their advantage. Also, they bought mmjmenu which we use to operate our collective, and the sync function from one menu to the other never syncs properly, so the weedmaps menu was always out of date.
THAT’s why I didn’t see you there! Thank God I put you in my contacts list on my laptop.
Weedmaps, welcome to how business is run. No pay, no play.
Good for you guys, I’m dropping their app off my phone.
Shame on WeedMaps for their greed. We Stand United With Sespe Creek on there decision to leave the BlackMailing Chumps of WeedMaps and I Thank Sespe Creek for their Loyalty and Quality care to their Patients, Im behind you 100%
It sounds like the same scam that the BBB(Better Business Bureau) pulls. In order to get a good rating from them you have to pay up big time – even if you’re a crappy business you can simply buy a good grafe from them. It’s such BS because people look to the BBB to be impartial and give fair reviews.
One of the businesses that has a so-so grade from the BBB is Spago – yes, THE Spago owned by Wolfgang Puck! He refuses to play the BBB’s extortion game so he has a mediocre grade. Sounds like WeedMaps is taking a cue from the BBB.
Your rant about Weedmaps is USELESS without offering links to MANY OTHER players. leafly is deasd, nothing but crickets there. No point in railing on weedmaps if you don’t have a viable alternative.
Well, for the record, at the time we left WeedMaps we still had high hopes for leafly — crickets or not, you’ve got to admit the concept is well-done. We still hope that Leafly succeeds, but in the meantime, we think thcfinder.com seems decent.
But there’s still a point in railing against WeedMaps, even if we couldn’t offer alternatives at that moment. Sometimes, you just have to take a stand.
Please stay tuned for a new site similar to Weedmaps, but much better. It will be focused on showcasing collectives that have patient care in mind first, not focused on those who pay the most. The membership price (includes menus, photos, better consumer end interface, etc.) will be a flat rate for EVERYONE, and simple listings with only name, address, and contact information will be FREE.
The owners are determined to give back to the MMJ community. Real patients with real, legitimate reviews will be rewarded. Collectives will be rewarded for having high ratings by being given free months of membership. (The rating system will be far more advanced, and both patients and collectives will be held better accountable).
Please stay tuned, for this will become a reality soon. The site will be at full force readily prepared to take all of Weedmaps traffic as soon as it launches. The owners are determined to take Weedmaps down a notch, and create a site that the MMJ community can be proud of.
ALSO:
Justin Hatfield, owner of Weedmaps, was quoted saying he thinks MMJ is fake (Google Justin Hatfield Wall Street Journal). He also admitted to lying to his doctor to get his recommendation. All the while boasting about the money he was making on the backs of collectives, doctors, and ultimately patients.
Weedmaps makes, on average, over $400k a MONTH. They grossed $780k last March. They need to be taken down a notch. The saddest part is the fact that NORML partnered with Weedmaps Media to revamp the NORML site.
I hope your collective, and others, support the new site coming out next year.
Please keep us posted on this. We’re very much interested in supporting any site that does what Weedmaps is supposed to do, only does it *right*.
I totally agree with this and I have a solution! I just started working with weedfinder.com and we totally support posting other legitimate lab info on our site! We are up and just getting going, so help us improve with comments and registering. Weedmaps needs real competition and we are stepping up to meet this challenge! We are set to hard release the site on 4/20/13 with an equal size booth to weedmaps at the high times cannabis cup in Denver! I am very hopeful about this as I believe weedmaps has been bad for our culture. Tell em Duck sent ya, peace and pot,
Eddie
Weedfinder.com rep
[email protected]
Can’t find a Doctor but one in Corona, she is closed 7 days a week!!!
Hi jim. Please give us a call, we can help you
866-758-2369
Weed maps has never been any thing but BULLSHIT spam…if you post a bad review it gets taken down only good reviews are left up…the site is all BULLSHIT!
Weedmaps F**king SUCKs.. I got banned for writing a bad review, and can’t log onto it. screw them
It seems to me that weedmaps all in all is a lie! Every fuckin place on weedmaps you go there and they all say they are sold out, the prices are bogus and the deals are blowy FUCK WEEDMAPS!!!! They lie and tell you the dispensaries have lotys of weed for a good price but they are all wrong
I am seeing the light over @ WeedMaps and as they seem to favor the owner over the customer as my review was removed three times.
I emailed them tonight saying I am going to find it hard trusting comments from here on out seeing as you allow the owner of a dispensary to cover up an honest comment with tons of fakes…all made one after the other to cover the truth!Maybe most of the comments really are fakes???
Bull crap! I’m still pissed!
FUCK WEEDMAPS THEY DELETED MY PROFILE, AND BANNED ME FROM THERE SITE. THEY ARE A BUNCH OF ASSHOLE MONEYHUNGER MOTHERFUCKERS
I have personally sent meds to get tested at sc and tested them, I sent the same meds with different names and got different results as a grower I want to really know if the high thc levels are correct. Everyone just grabs a bud and stuffs it not realizing the dedication it takes to grow that fine nug tested or not we have been doing it on our own so do we need them I know what I feed my plants do you?
Hey whats up Sespe Creek Collective. I’m with a local delivery service here in Palm Springs and was looking at your boycott of Weedmaps and think it’s a very good idea but posting on your blog is the wrong way to go about it. Contact your local collectives who,like you, are being bled dry every month for a 3rd rate listing on weedmaps. If you havent noticed when you look up certain areas no matter where your at the primary ones are always on the top of the list as well as having the biggest dispensary icon, some of them like that arent even dispensaries but delivery services.(Godess Delivers, which is in santa barbara,los angeles,palm springs,and im sure other places in ca for example). Ask all the collectives to boycott weedmaps until we all get equal treatment no matter what lab we use for testing, or how much we pay them monthly. Because your right they do have the market monopolized as far as medical cannabis reference systems go but we as the collectives are the ones allowing it. If we boycott until we all get equal price for a listing, and search ranks based on popularity not on monthly fees and quit paying them until we do they give in. Why would patients want to use weedmaps if no collectives are on there anymore? As one collective they dont care because they have thousands of other customers, but if you can get all the collectives in your area to back you, they’ll have no choice but to give in because they’ll feel that financial loss every month as well as all the app users in your area who would get sick of weedmaps for not having anybody in their area on there. I m willing to try it out over here in my area, let me know what you guys think so we can start a synchronized effort.
here’s a great alternative to weedmaps – http://www.wikileaf.com
I went to the site, put in my zip code (which is a regular old California zip code), and it put me somewhere near the International Date Line. I think it’ll be a better alternative when it works 🙂
There’s a great alternative now that’s popped up… Built by the guys that made mapquest. Leafbuyer.com… I’m seeing it all over Colorado and I think they’re opening in Cali soon. Looks promising to me…
That’s very odd — I tried to look for CA listings, and it took me to a no results page that showed I could look in either Colorado or Washington — but there are definite California listings listed as CO! For instance, Bakersfield: zip code is definitely CA, but address as listed says CO which is quite incorrect. So it’s got CA and CO mixed in together. Seems to me that mixing up the states would be a huge no-no in a locator app. It’s not as bad as that other locator that thought my zip code (in Southern California) was near the International Date Line, but it’s still pretty bad.
I’d love to see one of these things that actually works.
I’d switch over to MMJpal.com when we launch, shouldn’t be more than a month, we will be integrating over five thousand listings and allowing Dispensary Owners and Doctors to claim them free.
Hi Sespe,
We had a little issue with zip codes a while back but check us out now. I think you’ll see its running smoothly (both on a laptop, tablet or phone!).
Also, we have our menu pages launching this month and are letting select dispensaries use them free until 2016. Email me and Ill get you guys all set up.
Hope weed maps drops off the net.
Yeah and I will then be developing CannFind.com to compete with everyone. Competition brings out the best in everyone.
Check out wheresweed.com if you aren’t already on there. Android, ios, wp app and online pre-ordering
Are you guys still boycotting weed maps?
We are. As far as we know, they haven’t changed their monopolistic policy where you can’t include test results unless you use their laboratory, and we are very happy with our (non-weedmaps affiliated) labs. Lab testing is important to us — as it should be for everyone — and we believe that patients searching a directory should be able to differentiate between collectives that do test, and those that don’t, whether or not they are using the directory’s affiliated company.
Since I found my provider, I have not bought anywhere else in over three years.
My last ounce of chronic was $125.00
thc-TheHumboldtConnection.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20120124103115/http://cannabiswarrior.com/2011/09/27/weedmaps-still-sucks
Cannabis Warrior doesn’t show the article anymore. Here’s a snapshot from a couple years ago.
Keep the fight goin!
Thanks! I’ve updated our link so it goes to the archived page.
Recently Weedmaps changed their software so you can’t tell them your location, instead, your location is automatically determined by their software and, apparently, can’t be changed when it’s wrong! I live in mid Los Angeles, and when I go to the site now it tells me I’m located in Santa Ana, CA, and gives me dispensaries there. How blinking stupid is that? And to top it off, there seems to be no way to contact them! There’s no contact info on the Weedmaps website, and I received no response whatsoever to two posts I left on their facebook page! Just rakin’ in the money without having to do much of anything to help their users!
Have you tried Leafly? If you go to Find Local, I believe it asks to use your location but if it gets it wrong, you can open the Advanced Finder and specify a city.
Also, I did notice at the top of Weedmaps page, it shows your location and has an icon next to it that when you click it says “use my location”. You can’t select the text in the box so it doesn’t look editable, but if you type in there it seems to work and you can enter a different city, it’ll give you suggestions below the box and you can click on them.
Hope this helps you find medicine!
No, there’s no way to remove “Santa Ana” from the location box or type in anything else! That’s the first thing I tried! This just changed in the past two weeks. It used to ask me if I wanted to share my location with Weedmaps when I first went to the page, I’d click yes, and it would go to Koreatown/Echo Park map. Now it TELLS ME that I live in Santa Ana!
Leafly is not up to date. They show three dispensaries I used to go to that all closed down six months to a year ago.
Have you tried wheresweed.com
Thanks so much! Looks like a winner!
Thanks for this page – we’re a delivery service in LA and can’t stand these f^%$@s! Once we can find an alternative (or multiple alternatives) that can generate similar awareness, we’lll be ghost. Already reinvesting our $$ into trying new things vs spending it with them.
Hate them with a newfound passion. Any alternatives that people have heard of, we’re all ears…
There’s also another site that is setting up a good map and they have been around for a few years. http://www.passingrass.com it’s a cannabis dating network.
Leafly!!! Last time we checked…they wanted 1.5x more than weedmaps per pin…lol
A paid listing isn’t required though, is it?
Does anyone know of good cloud-based software for MMJ delivery services? We’re looking at MMJ Menu but they’re not 100% delivery friendly and we’re not thrilled that they were bought by WeedMaps. WebJoint isn’t 100% up and running and doesn’t have some of the nice features that MMJMenu does. Interested in your feedback!
Also, to join on the WeedMaps rant, they won’t provide any data on monthly views, views of your competitors, or anything to support why you should pay even MORE money to move up on their ranking system. They recently approached us and asked if we wanted to move from a #9 slot to a #4 slot for an additional $900 a month, yet wouldn’t provide any data to support why we should. F*%K YOU WeedMaps. We’ll stay at #9.
We have yet to find software that works with delivery and offers all the features we need (or even all the features they claim to offer, for that matter). We even tried building our own! Alas, “isn’t 100% up and running” seems to be the industry standard at the moment. We had high hopes for MJ Freeway and CannSoft but they weren’t done either. MMJMenu may not give us everything we wish we could have, but it works.
Thank you so much for the quick reply. How do you handle handle local sales tax in each city (if you’re in a state that charges sales tax)? Are you wrapping it up into the cost of each product? Also, how are you tracking each driver’s total delivery? We pay commissions to each driver and need to see who delivered what. Sorry for all the questions. We’ve had a few calls with MMJMenu but the level of knowledge from each person is hit or miss. It would be interesting to hear how you’re making this work for you.
Thanks!
Yes we include all relevant local sales tax in the final cost of the product so we are dealing with even totals. Each driver goes out with a printed receipt and comes back with the receipt and the payment.
Hey Jesus, I also run a delivery service and would love to ask you some quick questions if you don’t mind. Do you mind if I shoot you an email?