Marijuana's Amazon.com (in Sonoma County!)

Out of work? Laid off? Can't find a job? Create your own business.

Here's how a local Sonoma County entrepeneur has created his own online business. A business built to meet the needs of California's booming medical marijuana industry.

Huffington Post's article (originally posted on CNN.com:

Medical marijuana, meet e-commerce

Excerpt:

(CNNMoney.com) -- Entrepreneur John Lee thinks the pot business is ready for its own Amazon.com.

The numbers back him up. Marijuana is California's biggest cash crop, generating sales estimated at $14 billion a year. Thanks to the state's increasingly liberal medical marijuana laws, more of that money than ever before is being spent legally.

Which leaves sellers with new challenges: Taxes. Invoices. Supply chain management. Regulatory compliance.
Enter PlainView Systems, a four-month-old Sonoma startup that aims to bring sophisticated business management tools to an industry that has only recently begun operating like one. "It's a business where everyone is very, very paranoid," Lee says."

Plainview System's mission statement from its main page:

"PlainView Systems’ Compassionate Care Marketplace, or CCM, provides both a dynamic, online business-to-business exchange for licensed providers of compassionate care medical marijuana products and services as well as a patient-to-licensed grower connection to procure medicine. With an extensive catalog of products and services, our unique CCM allows members to form collectives and build on-going relationships in a totally compliant, secure environment. In addition, we offer collective management, with comprehensive business data management capabilities including detailed invoicing, integration with popular accounting software, inventory and transactions in full compliance of California state and local laws."