A product-by-product comparison of Trends (Long Island City) against 69 other cannabis dispensaries across Queens — and its three Long Island City neighbors specifically — to explain why customers aren’t coming back.
Across every major category, Trends sits above the borough median. The gap is widest on the small, repeat-purchase items — joints, disposables and edibles — exactly the products that bring customers back.
Of 157 comparable products…
| Product | Trends | Market | Over |
|---|
Trends carries 237 products. The typical Queens dispensary carries 414, and the deepest carry 1,000–2,000. A thin shelf means more customers leave empty-handed — or never bother coming back.
Distinct products available somewhere in Queens vs. what Trends stocks.
| Category | Available in Queens | Trends carries | Coverage |
|---|
Three other dispensaries share Trends’ ZIP code (11101) in Long Island City — the stores a customer can most easily walk to instead. Where their shelves overlap with Trends, Trends is almost always the more expensive choice, and two of the three carry a comparable or deeper selection.
| Long Island City competitor | Products carried | Overlapping items | Trends pricier on | Avg. gap |
|---|
“Overlapping items” = products both stores carry, where prices can be compared directly. Just A Little Higher stocks a nearly separate catalog, so direct price overlap is minimal — but with 210 products it still competes hard for the same foot traffic.
Alpine IQ tracks every customer’s lifecycle. The picture is stark: more than half the customer base has stopped coming, and most people who do buy never make a second trip. This is the churn that the pricing and assortment gaps are feeding.
Every customer, by lifecycle stage (Alpine IQ)
Of 1,504 buyers this period, how many came back for an Nth visit
This is the heart of it. Trends’ core shoppers — 25-44 year-olds, 70% of the base — buy prerolls and vapes above everything else. Those are the same categories Trends marks up hardest over the market. The store is taxing its most popular, habit-forming products, so first-time buyers try once, feel overcharged, and defect to the cheaper shops a block away.
Category mix is led by prerolls and vapes across every age group; flower’s share grows with age. Core buyer is 25-44 (70% of customers), with basket size rising from $41 (18-24) to $79 (45-54).
The steepest premiums land squarely on the highest-volume, most repeat-driving categories — the exact products that should earn a second visit are the ones priced to lose it.
| Age | Customers | Share | Avg. basket | Loyalty members |
|---|
The 25-44 band drives the business but also churns hardest — and it’s the most price-sensitive. Winning it back is where the retention gains are.
+14.8% above the Queens median on average, higher on 85% of comparable products, and the single most expensive store in the borough on 90 of them. Nothing about the location or catalog justifies a premium — neighbors undercut it.
237 products vs. a 414 median, 56th of 70 stores. Whole categories are barely represented — only 32 flower SKUs, 19 pre-rolls. A customer who wants a specific strain or format usually can’t get it here.
Prerolls (+33%), disposables (+19%) and edibles (+15%) carry the biggest markups — and Alpine IQ shows those are exactly the categories customers buy most. The trips that should build loyalty are the ones lost on price.
80% of this period’s buyers purchased just once. Only 1 in 5 came back for a second visit — the drop-off between visit 1 and visit 2 is where the business is bleeding.
4,663 customers (52%) are classified “Gone,” representing ~$729K in lapsed revenue. The loyalty program isn’t catching them — opt-outs (398) now outrun opt-ins (272).
Three cheaper or deeper dispensaries share Trends’ ZIP. NYC Bud carries more for less; Nice Yield undercuts by ~13%. Defecting is effortless for a Trends customer today.
Four moves, in priority order — each tied directly to what the data shows is broken. The first two stop the leak; the last two refill the bucket.
Bring prerolls, vapes and edibles down to at least the Queens median. These are simultaneously the most-bought categories and the most overpriced (+15% to +33%). This is the single fastest lever — it removes the “I got overcharged” reason a first-time buyer doesn’t return.
The drop-off is between visit 1 and visit 2. Use Alpine IQ to fire an automated, market-priced offer within days of a first purchase — on the customer’s own category (preroll/vape). And fix the loyalty bleed: opt-outs (398) now exceed opt-ins (272), so the current messaging is pushing people away.
There’s ~$729K of lapsed revenue sitting in the Gone segment, and reactivation already works (82 won back with almost no effort). Run a targeted win-back to Gone and Highly-Absent customers with a genuinely competitive offer on their favorite category — framed as “we’ve lowered our prices.”
Trends stocks a fraction of the market in its best-selling categories (19 prerolls, 34 carts, 44 disposables, 32 flower). Expand toward the ~414 median so the 25-44 core finds the formats it wants — and specifically match NYC Bud and undercut Nice Yield to win back the LIC foot traffic before competing borough-wide.
Trends already runs welcome and win-back flows and sends deals twice a week at a high match rate. Reach and frequency aren’t the constraint. The constraint is that a percentage-off coupon can’t out-discount a base-price gap: when the shelf price sits 15–33% above the shop down the block, the coupon only pulls Trends back toward even — and the moment it expires, Trends is the expensive option again.
| Repeat-buy example | Shelf | −15% | −20% | Competitor |
|---|
Pick 10–15 hero SKUs (house preroll, top vape, an eighth of flower) and price them at or below market every day — not as a coupon. Shoppers judge “is this place expensive” on a handful of known items; win those and the premium elsewhere stops mattering. This is what a coupon can never do: change the everyday price they see.
NYC Bud, Nice Yield and Just A Little Higher are a short walk away and cheaper or deeper. A visible “we match any Long Island City dispensary” removes the single easiest reason to defect and turns the biggest weakness into a trust signal — permanently, not for 30 days.
Many shoppers price-check before they walk in — mostly via Google (your listing, your website menu, and Google Shopping results). If Trends shows higher prices there than the neighbors, the customer is lost at the search stage, before any email or coupon can reach them. Audit how Trends’ hero prices appear online and get them competitive.
Build the habit of choosing Trends, not a one-time redemption: pair preroll + edible, bundle the vape with the lighter that’s already your top add-on, run buy-3 preroll deals, and offer auto-refill for habitual vape/preroll buyers so the repeat purchase is locked in.
Opt-outs (398) outrunning opt-ins (272) is a red flag that people are enrolled poorly at the register, then bail. Fix enrollment quality at POS and lean on budtender recommendations — the highest-converting “campaign” in the store, and it costs nothing to send.
A member-gets-member program turns your ~2,981 Active customers into an acquisition channel — and referred customers retain better than discount-chasers, so it compounds instead of eroding margin.
Bottom line: keep the email flows running — they’re fine. But the second visit is won or lost on the everyday price a customer sees on the shelf and on the aggregators, not on how many deals hit their inbox. Fix the price gap and the campaigns you already have start converting.
Retention fixes keep the customers Trends already earns. This is the other side: how many new shoppers even reach the door digitally, and where to find more of them. The numbers show a store that is already found — strong local map-pack presence and healthy traffic — but leaning almost entirely on free traffic, paying for at least one worthless source, and, most importantly, not converting the shoppers it reaches. The digital problem isn’t getting seen; it’s getting chosen.
Organic keyword footprint (SearchAtlas keyword gap)
Big NYC dispensary terms competitors rank for and Trends doesn’t — of 1,468 total keyword opportunities
| Search term | Monthly searches | Who ranks (not Trends) |
|---|
Caveat: NYC Bud ranks for the generic “NYC dispensary” terms largely because “NYC” is in its brand and domain name — those are hard for Trends to win. The winnable-and-worthwhile targets are the borough and near-me terms below, where ranking is earned by content and authority, not a brand name.
Trends ranks well for its LIC terms — but that’s a tiny pool of searches (just 9 keywords, ~30–170/mo each). The real volume sits in the broader borough and near-me “dispensary” terms, where Trends barely appears and NYC Bud has built authority.
| LIC keyword | Searches/mo | Trends |
|---|---|---|
| lic dispensary | 880 | #4 |
| long island city dispensary | 110 | #7 |
| long island city stores | 170 | #36 |
| trends long island city | 30 | #1 |
| Broader keyword | Searches/mo | Trends |
|---|---|---|
| nyc dispensary | 18,100 | — |
| brooklyn dispensary | 2,900 | — |
| long island dispensary | 2,400 | #45 |
| queens dispensary | 1,000 | — |
So “rank for Long Island City” is already done and doesn’t move the needle. The growth target is the borough / near-me terms — but that’s a content-and-authority build over months. Given Trends is already found and already not converting, this ranks behind fixing price and retention.
The organic breadth gap is real — but the highest-intent local search is a strength, not a weakness. Across a geo-grid of “dispensary” searches around Long Island City, Trends ranks in the map pack almost everywhere, on a stellar 4.9★ / 977-review profile. Discovery at the local level isn’t the problem. Being found isn’t converting into visits and repeat visits — which points straight back to price, not traffic.
6,253 sessions · ~223/day · Jun 16–Jul 13 (Google Analytics)
Trends is paying for the wrong channels and skipping the ones where in-market cannabis shoppers actually search. Reallocate toward high-intent, cannabis-legal discovery — in priority order.
Trends already owns its LIC terms — but those are ~30–900 searches/mo, so they barely move traffic. The volume is in the borough / near-me “dispensary” terms (Brooklyn 2,900, Long Island 2,400, Queens 1,000, “dispensary near me”) where NYC Bud built authority and Trends is absent. Winning these takes content and links, not a brand name — worthwhile, but a months-long build that ranks behind fixing price, since more traffic to an overpriced store just means more one-and-done.
The heatmap shows Trends already ranks in the map pack almost everywhere for “dispensary” (avg 3.3, 72% top-3, 4.9★ / 977 reviews). Keep the reviews and profile fresh to hold it — but recognize what it means: the walk-in-ready searcher is already finding Trends and not converting. Don’t spend to get found; spend to get chosen (i.e., fix price).
It’s the paid channel clearly pulling real, engaged visitors (77% engagement, ~2m46s visits). Cannabis faces heavy ad restrictions, so a compliant shop/brand search campaign is rare and valuable — put more budget behind the one that already performs.
trafficheap.cc is ~8% of traffic that never converts — the classic signature of purchased/bot traffic. Stop paying for it and move the budget to local SEO, Google Business Profile and Google Ads, where the visitors are real and in-market.
Turn the ~2,981 Active customers into reviewers and referrers. Reviews lift the map-pack ranking (feeding the GBP lever) and referred customers retain better — durable growth that doesn’t depend on ad platforms that restrict cannabis.
The through-line: Trends is already found — it wins the local map pack and pulls solid traffic. So the digital priority isn’t just more at-bats; it’s converting the ones it already gets (which loops back to price), broadening the organic footprint on winnable local terms, scaling the Google Ads campaign that works, and cutting the purchased junk traffic. Getting seen is handled; getting chosen is the job.