Cannabis Pricing Research & Market Data

60K+

Products tracked across THC & CBD

200+

Verified merchants and brands

Weekly

Publication cadence

DOI

Archived on Zenodo — citable dataset

Overview

What is the Cannabis Price Index?

The CannabisDealsUS Cannabis Price Index (CPI) is a structured weekly dataset that tracks pricing, discount rates, and SKU availability across major online cannabis and CBD product categories. It is built on a BigQuery data pipeline that ingests, standardises, and aggregates product and price data from affiliate feeds representing 200+ verified US merchants and brands.

Each weekly edition covers subcategory price distributions across THC vapes, THC edibles, THC flower, CBD oil, CBD gummies, and related product types. The index uses a fixed baseline period to track directional price movement, enabling week-on-week and year-on-year comparison at the subcategory level.

The CPI is designed to be reproducible and citable. Every weekly snapshot is archived to Zenodo under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, making it available for academic research, journalism, and market analysis.

Key Findings

Market insights from the index

Consistent structural patterns emerge across categories and time periods. The following observations are drawn from the weekly CPI dataset.

Discount Rate Volatility

THC vape and edible categories consistently show higher discount frequency than CBD categories, with promotional depth accelerating during seasonal windows such as 4/20 and end-of-quarter clearance periods.

Price Distribution by Category

Price distributions within subcategories are right-skewed, with a concentration of products in mid-tier price bands and a long tail of premium products that carry significantly higher average price points.

CBD vs THC Price Trends

CBD product categories demonstrate greater price stability week-on-week compared to THC categories, which exhibit more reactive pricing behaviour tied to inventory cycles and promotional events.

Merchant Pricing Behaviour

A subset of high-volume merchants maintain consistent price positioning across the catalogue, while a larger group of merchants use deep, time-limited discounts as their primary competitive lever.

View Full Price Index

Data & Methodology

How the index is constructed

The CPI is built on the same analytical rigour applied to enterprise data work. The pipeline follows strict layer separation to ensure data integrity at every stage.

Pipeline Overview

Raw affiliate product and pricing data is ingested daily from affiliate network feeds into a BigQuery raw layer — append-only, never modified.
A business logic layer standardises prices (currency normalisation, sale detection, discount calculation), classifies products into canonical subcategories, and produces a clean weekly snapshot.
An analytics layer computes subcategory-level aggregates, index values relative to a fixed baseline period, and distribution statistics for the weekly report.
Each weekly dataset is exported to Zenodo before publication, creating a permanent, versioned archive with a citable DOI.
No smoothing or rolling averages are applied. Each week's index reflects the actual snapshot of the market for that period.

The full methodology is documented on the CannabisDealsUS Cannabis Price Index page. The data architecture is described in the analytics methodology for this platform.

Dataset & Archive

The CannabisDealsUS Cannabis Price Index dataset is archived on Zenodo under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. Available for academic research, market analysis, and journalism.

Zenodo Dataset (DOI) Zenodo PDF Record Live Index