LemonStand Review
- Date Established
- 2010
- Location
- Vancouver, BC
Pros
- Advanced design customization
- Well-designed UI
- Competitive pricing
- Numerous features
- Excellent customer support
- Attractive theme templates
- Scalable
Cons
- Developer skills required
- Limited integrations
- Limited phone support
Overview
When life gives you lemons, launch an ecommerce platform!
In 2010, a Canadian startup followed this sage advice and launched LemonStand for growing ecommerce sellers. Originally released as downloadable software built with PHP, LemonStand now provides fully-hosted ecommerce sites to over 2,000 merchants, all while offering excellent customer service and a continually expanding feature set.
However, LemonStand isn’t your typical SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. Unlike websites built on most SaaS platforms, LemonStand websites are completely customizable. You can change nearly every aspect of the look and feel of your web store. The only trouble is that in order to make those changes, you’ll have to dive into the source code.
Along with a high degree of customizability, other important aspects of LemonStand include strong subscription billing features and an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) for engaging customers with your brand. Pricing levels for LemonStand are based solely upon the number of orders placed on your site per month, and plans start at just $19 for 75 orders. You secure access to all the core LemonStand features from the get-go, and your store is positioned to grow alongside your increasing financial investment in the software.
To help you discern if LemonStand’s pricing, feature set, and customer service approach could work well for your online business, let’s get straight to the full review!
Table of Contents
Pricing
LemonStand offers a free 14-day trial, no credit card required, so you can try out the platform risk-free before you commit. If you do decide to go with LemonStand for your online store, you’ll likely end up in one of three main pricing tiers based on the number of orders customers place on your site each month. Pay close attention to these transaction thresholds when you’re considering LemonStand for your store. If you exceed your order cap, you automatically bump to the next pricing level.
The upside of this pricing model is that all of LemonStand’s core features are offered at each of the three main plan levels. We’ll outline this feature set in more detail later in this review. For now, note that each plan comes with unlimited products and variants, unlimited staff accounts, and unlimited file storage and bandwidth. There are also no transaction fees or cancellation fees. Here are the three plans that share all of LemonStand’s core features:
- Starter — $19/month
- 75 orders per month
- Standard email support (response within 24 hours)
- Growth — $69/month
- 300 orders per month
- Standard email support (response within 24 hours)
- Professional — $199/month
- 1000 orders per month
- Priority email support (response within 12 hours)
In addition to the above standardized plans, LemonStand offers one more: custom pricing for enterprise-level merchants processing over 1000 orders/month. LemonStand Premium boasts the following additional features:
- Premium — $399+/month
- >1000 orders per month
- Sandbox store
- Higher API limit
- Custom email sender domain
- Avalara AvaTax integration
- Secured credit card vaulting
- Dedicated success coach
- Priority phone support
Every plan is billed on a monthly basis (no contracts required). However, the pricing page mentions that you can save money by paying annually. Contact the sales team for specific numbers.
Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
LemonStand is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution and will handle web hosting for you.
Specific Size Of Business
Although smaller businesses can use LemonStand, full customization of your site really requires a skilled web developer and designer. In order to best use LemonStand, you should either have those skills or be able to afford someone who does.
Hardware & Software Requirements
Because the software is hosted for you, you won’t need anything beyond a computer, an internet connection, and up-to-date web browser.
Ease Of Use
LemonStand offers a free two-week trial so you can (and you definitely should) try out the platform before you purchase.
When I signed up for the trial, I received an email from the founder (from his actual email address that I could reply to if I wished, which was kind of cool). The message contained login information and a link to my new storefront.
Here is what I first encountered inside by dashboard:
As you can see, LemonStand helps you get started with a few instructions. I momentarily skipped the suggested first step — theme and storefront setup — and spent some time testing the functional backend first.
Fortunately, as a whole, I found LemonStand’s admin to be easy to navigate. Everything you need is on the left-hand sidebar. I didn’t have to spend large chunks of time digging for hidden features; they’re all readily available.
Here are some of the features I tested:
Adding Products:Â This is accomplished similarly to any other user-friendly platform. You just input product descriptions and images, pricing, shipping information, and attributes. It’s all point and click. The input fields are divided into two columns — a main section down the center of the page, and a narrower column on the right (with a light gray background):
I’d prefer if the product traits were listed in expandable tabs above the fold so I could more easily view all of them at once. The full screen gets pretty arduous to scroll through, and you may start to wonder if it will ever end:
One obviously missing element is a quick way to preview your product on the storefront right from the product page. Call me lazy, but I’d rather not open my storefront separately and go searching for each product to preview my changes.
Discounts:Â It’s possible to set quite complex and specific discounts right out-of-the-box with this platform. With added complexity comes a slight learning curve, however. You’ll be opening up deeper menus to add conditions and sub-conditions — setting lots of parameters to make the discounts work properly. On the plus side, there is pretty good documentation available to assist you along the way. Ultimately, I would still call this feature user-friendly, especially since I often complain that discount engines are not complex enough.
CMS (content management system):Â Content pages come with an with easy-to-use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor:
Subscription Billing:Â IÂ was impressed with the level of detail that is possible to configure out-of-the-box. However, to tap into the full potential of this feature (such allowing your customers to reschedule or skip orders), you’ll need coding experience.
This brings me to the main thing you should understand about LemonStand in regards to ease of use. While it is quite easy to operate the basics of the control panel, for some of LemonStand’s more nuanced features, you’ll eventually encounter something like this:
Here, we’ve gone beyond WYSIWYG editors and entered the land of code. You should be aware that LemonStand is not afraid to present you with customization opportunities that require a higher skill level than just filling in or checking off pre-made boxes. Depending on your prior knowledge and/or your ability to hire a developer, this will either excite or intimidate you. Having said that, I still think LemonStand scores well on usability overall.
If you’re looking for information about editing your storefront’s design, try the Web Design section below.
Features
LemonStand is constantly updating and adding new features, so I’d recommend taking a look at the public roadmap on the website to see what’s next on the docket. With LemonStand’s pricing system, all core features are available on all plans.
In particular, we like that LemonStand offers product subscription features out-of-the-box. Typically these features are only available by add-on. LemonStand reports that a lot of new customers are taking advantage of these subscription features.
As you begin to explore the LemonStand features that interest you, I’d suggest verifying the extent to which each feature will require some coding knowledge on your part. This is not always 100% clear until you dig a little deeper into the feature. That said, here’s a summary of what’s offered:
Admin
- Inventory Management:Â Set your products to automatically hide when they are out of stock.
- Shipping Rates: Configure your own shipping tables or use integrations with major shipping carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS, Canada Post, and Australia Post) for real-time shipping rates.
- Tax:Â Set your own tax rates or integrate with Avalara for easier tax setup.
- Analytics:Â View stats on abandoned cart rates, traffic, sales, etc.
- Order Management:Â Automatically send order status updates to staff and customers. Use the built-in test payment gateway to test checkout and order management before launching your store.
Design
- Customizable Checkouts:Â Fine-tune the look, feel, and functionality of your checkout pages. Customers check out on your site; they won’t be redirected to a LemonStand URL.
- Command Line Tool:Â Use LemonSync for local theme development.
- A/B Testing: Experiment with design and checkout changes to observe the impact on conversion.
- Free Open-Source Themes:Â These themes are 100% customizable if you have the right know-how. LemonStand uses the Twig theming language.
Products
- Unlimited:Â Set unlimited categories, products, products options, variants, and images.
- Custom Products:Â Provide customers with custom fields to enter their specifications for custom-made products.
- Digital Products:Â Sell digital products (photos, music, etc.) on the same site as your physical products.
- Subscription Selling & Recurring Billing:Â Sell subscription products with LemonStand’s recurring billing feature.
- Flexible Pricing: Implement volume, wholesale, and group-based pricing.
Marketing
- Cross-Sell & Up-Sell:Â List related products and have them appear alongside products your customers are considering.
- Discounts: Create discount codes and specify how many times they can be used.
- Built-In Email Marketing: Create as many types of automated emails to your customers as you’d like.
- Target Abandoned Carts: Manage abandoned cart recovery emails via the native MailChimp integration.
CMS & SEO
- SEO Features:Â Customize URLs and metadata. Manage title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions on-page.
- Global CDN: Quick page loads via the Content Delivery Network help boost your SEO rankings, while also making impatient customers happy.
- WYSIWYG Editor For CMS:Â Manage your site’s pages, announcements, and blog posts from a “what you see is what you get” editor.
- Widgets:Â Create your own widgets and embed them on your site.
Web Design
LemonStand has 15 free themes available, including the bare “Bones” theme for developers who want a near-blank canvas. One of the themes — FrescoBox — is designed specifically for subscription-based businesses. All the templates are fully mobile responsive and open-source.
There’s a reason all LemonStand themes are called “starter” themes: they’re meant to be customized. If you’re thrown off by words like Twig, Bootstrap, and Angular, you might have to hire someone to do that customization for you. On the other hand, I actually like LemonStand’s themes enough that I’d be content using one of the pre-made themes without any customization at all.
There isn’t a whole lot that those with limited tech ability can do to change the layout of the page, and there is no drag-and-drop editor. You can change a few colors, photos, and logos under Theme Settings:
And, you can change the text inside the pre-made widget blocks that come with your theme:
With these two simple tools, I changed the default Zest Theme from this:
To this:
I’m sure you’re very impressed, but in case you didn’t catch my changes, I uploaded a new logo and banner image, edited some text inside widget blocks, and switched every font color I had access to from red to blue. Now I’m really ready to sell things!
Each theme’s editor is slightly different, but you’re generally limited to these types of changes without diving into the HTML and CSS. LemonStand also offers its own design services for hire if you choose to go that route.
Integrations & Add-Ons
LemonStand provides several ways to access integrations, but still refers to launching a traditional app marketplace in the future tense. In the meantime, LemonStand heavily promotes its integration with Zapier, which is a service that allows you to connect with hundreds of other software programs. In fact, my impression is that LemonStand expects most subscribers to also have a Zapier account. You can tell which integrations are offered within Zapier by the little red Zapier flower logo in the top right-hand corner of each app:
The rest of the integrations come in two main groups. The first are native, built-in integrations that only require a few clicks to configure inside your LemonStand dashboard. This is a very small list, and currently includes:
- Zapier (of course)
- MailChimp
- Google Analytics
- Avalara
- ShipStation
- Quickbooks
The second group of non-Zapier integrations are also classified by LemonStand as “pre-built” and native, but these really require some extra steps and knowledge, such as adding code to your site or dealing with API keys. Clicking on these apps in your dashboard takes you to a “Help Guide” that documents the procedure. This group of integrations is larger, but here are just a few examples:
- ShipRush
- KissMetrics
- CartHook
- Ordoro
- LiveChat
- ShipWorks
- ReferralCandy
I should also mention that some integrations promoted on the main LemonStand website are accessed secondarily through an integration with something else, similar to the Zapier setup. For example, to integrate with Square POS, or marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, your LemonStand account would already need to be integrated with Ordoro (a shipping and fulfillment app) or similar.
So, depending on how you look at it, LemonStand easily integrates with just a handful of apps, over 1000 with Zapier, or somewhere in between. Approximately 50 integrations are currently promoted inside the LemonStand trial dashboard, including a sampling of Zapier-facilitated connections.
Of course, if you don’t see what you’re looking for, LemonStand also comes with a powerful RESTful API that allows your developers to build integrations for you. In that sense, LemonStand actually integrates with infinite apps! Again, the general assumption with LemonStand is that there is at least one person on your team who doesn’t run for the hills at the sight of code.
Payment Processing
With LemonStand, there are over 95 payment gateways available in over 100 countries. Unlike many other ecommerce platforms, LemonStand does not have an in-house, white-label processor, nor does it promote one gateway partner over others. The company is quite proud of its equal opportunity approach to payment processing.
Another rather unique aspect of LemonStand is the way your payment options are organized and presented in your dashboard. “Standard” gateways (shown in blue) keep customers within your site while they check out, whereas “Alternative” gateways (shown in yellow) redirect customers to an offsite payment form hosted directly by the payments provider. Examples of alternative methods include Amazon Pay, BitPay, and some PayPal configurations. The good news is that with either type of gateway, your checkout pages don’t actually touch or store card data, but it’s helpful to be aware of this difference. Note that the alternative gateways do not support LemonStand’s recurring billing feature at this time.
In no particular order, here are several LemonStand payment acceptance options we’ve reviewed at Merchant Maverick:
- Authorize.Net
- Braintree
- PayPal
- Bambora (formerly Beanstream)
- Stripe
- Amazon Payments
- BluePay
- Moneris
- WorldPay
- WePay
- Global Transport (Global Payments)
- Elavon
- Heartland (Global Payments)
- Sage Payment Solutions
- USAePay
- Intuit (Quickbooks Payments)
- Cayan
- BlueSnap
- Forte
- Merchant e-Solutions
- PayJunction
Customer Service & Technical Support
LemonStand’s support is available by email and live chat for all users and is accessed via your admin dashboard. Unfortunately, only LemonStand Premium customers have access to any phone support. If you ask me, it’s tricky marketing for LemonStand to state that premium customers get “priority” phone support, implying other customers get “regular” phone support. I wish the website was clearer on this. On the bright side, you can always try the sales phone number between 9AM-5PM Pacific time.
Let’s recap LemonStand’s technical support options:
- Phone: Premium Plan only
- Email/Web Ticket:
- Available 24/7
- Typically reply within one hour between 6AM-6PM PST
- Longest response time is 24 hours
- Live Chat:
- Monday-Friday 8AM-6PM PST
- Typically reply within three hours
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised with LemonStand’s customer support. I did have to wait until Monday morning for an answer to a question I emailed on a Saturday, but it wasn’t an urgent request. I have definitely received responses within the hour, and even within four minutes on one occasion. Compared to many other platforms’ response times, this is lightning-quick. Plus, all replies I received were clear and helpful.
If you’re up for finding answers on your own, here are some additional resources:
- Documentation:Â Support articles, tutorial videos, API documentation, code examples, and more are accessed at the main website or from your control panel.
- Blog: New feature announcements and ecommerce tips.
- Ebooks & Webinars:Â In-depth guides and ecommerce advice.
- Roadmap: LemonStand maintains a public Trello page tracking feature updates.
- Custom Support: Fill out the web contact form for a quote.
- Social Media: Reach out to the team or follow company news on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Dribbble. (Yes, Dribbble has three “bs.” It’s a network for artists and designers. Cute, eh?)
Negatives Reviews & Complaints
For the most part, LemonStand customers are happy with their platform. However, they also admit that LemonStand still has a few things to improve upon. Here’s what real LemonStand customers say about the platform:
- Lacking Features:Â Customers say that LemonStand is still working on developing some important features and integrations. All of these comments express the hope that LemonStand will develop those features in the future.
- Some Skill Required:Â In order to really design your store, you’ll need to have some knowledge of HTML and CSS, or at least be able to hire someone who can take care of it for you.
- Difficult Discount Features:Â I’ve seen a few complaints that LemonStand’s discount feature is not flexible enough to create very specific discounts. However, I don’t find that to be the case. LemonStand actually has a fairly robust discount engine; it’s just a little difficult to figure out at first. I suspect that this complaint is largely related to user error.
- Documentation Missing Detail: Customers report that LemonStand’s documentation is difficult to follow in places. Some features are not explained in detail.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
As I’ve mentioned, customer feedback on LemonStand is overwhelmingly positive on most comment boards. In particular, the platform has ranked in the “High Performer” quadrant by users on G2 Crowd in recent months. Here’s what customers love about LemonStand:
- Control & Customizability:Â It’s true that it takes some tech ability to manage a LemonStand account. However, if you have that ability, there’s very little you can’t change about your store. In particular, customers find their storefronts (the actual look and feel of their stores) to be very flexible.
- Continued Development: LemonStand is continually and consistently upgrading its existing features and adding new ones. You can view the company’s roadmap to see what they’re working on right now.
- Good Customer Service:Â I can attest to this one. I found LemonStand’s customer service to be courteous and responsive.
- Built-In Subscription Features: Subscription sellers love that the features they need are available out-of-the-box.
Other features LemonStand customers like (but mention less frequently) include:
- Open API for development
- No transaction fees
- Quick setup if you have basic web knowledge
Security
LemonStand comes with site-wide SSL certification, which is good for both your customers’ peace of mind and your search engine rankings. LemonStand stores are also PCI DSS compliant.
Your information will be secure in LemonStand’s global CDN (content delivery network) and will go through automatic backups.
Final Verdict
If you’ve considered Shopify but prefer a shopping cart with more customizability, LemonStand may be the way to go. You’ll have access to solid customer support, a beautiful admin, and 100% open-source themes. Since you’ve made it this far in our review, you’re also already well aware that some technical know-how is required to make the most of this platform. If you have the resources to hire someone to do your web development for you, then LemonStand is definitely worth your consideration.
Although LemonStand’s pricing starts out very affordable for small sellers, keep the prices of the higher level plans in mind. Of course, I’m assuming you’d like your monthly order numbers to increase over time, in which case you’ll eventually hit those automatic price bumps. If you sell a small number of large ticket items, however, you’ll really hit LemonStand’s sweet spot. (Sour spot? Sorry, the lemon analogy broke down on me there.)
Click the link below to sign up for a free (no commitment) trial of LemonStand to get a better understanding of what this platform can do for you.
Liz Hull
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I work for one of the largest software companies in the world as a solutions engineer by day and also run my own startup, http://www.DollarScent.com – a monthly subscription service for premium car air fresheners. Prior to that, I was part of the founding team of a successful eCommerce software company for online retailers selling on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, Magento, etc. When launching DollarScent, I figured WooCommerce could meet our needs. We spent a LONG time fussing around with WordPress/WooCommerce and after over a year eventually gave up. Most of our energy was spent trying to fix WP all the time and it prevented us from ever being able to grow our business without worry.We expressed our concerns to LemonStand and after some time decided to make the switch. LemonStand was paramount in helping us migrate all of our existing paid subscribers (which no other software company was willing to do). As someone who’s been involved in technology for many years, I must say that LemonStand’s support, onboarding, and setup has been the absolute most pleasant experience I’ve had to date. Their engineering and support team REALLY care to see you successful. Ross, who runs Biz Dev, was our go to contact the whole way through and helped to facilitate a smooth transition.We are now up and running for several months without any worry and have since then focused our energies on sales and marketing. We are excited about our partnership with LemonStand and we plan on staying with them as we continue to focus on growing our subscriber base. If you’re a subscription box business or just a general eCommerce retailer, give them a shot… I promise you won’t be disappointed!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We were using stand alone version of Lemonstand, which was abandoned with no real migration path to their hosted version (old and new versions were not compatible). To this day (2017) cloud version does not have all the features of stand alone version. I would question company commitment to what they do. It is significant hassle to move active shop when vendor have change of heart on direction of their product development.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Is migration to Amazon in the works?
Thanks!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
After running my business for last 12 years and being on the same ecommerce platform, even though our previous platform changed hands, we were quite comfortable. Next came the mobile avalanche that made us pull outside our comfort zone. It is quite a task to look for dependable ecommerce platform, after reviewing 3 platforms we landed with LemonStand. Lemonstand’s new cloud based ecommerce was very attractive, giving customers like me a good option to come on. First thing that attracted us was that they do not charge transaction fees, so no cut from my sales. They provide their SAAS platform and I pay them for that. Next was the flexibility their platform provides to stores owners with customizing every corner of the store. No part of the store is hidden from store owners. Their easy Restful API was another big plus that allowed us to integrate our internal system with the new store. Lastly, the most important, the Mobile friendly themes that integrate very easily with their system. There are quite a few themes to choose from, all available for free to use and change.During our designing of store, the support that was given to us was outstanding. They have a startup culture and implementing genuine feature request does not have to go through bureaucracy. If feature makes sense then it is implemented quickly. For example, we had 1000 zip code and sales tax rates that were wondering how we are going to enter it manually, made a request to add API call to add these sales tax. Within 2 weeks the API was coded and we were able to add all our taxes in like 15 minutes. This is where they won us over. Our store beadsinbulk.com is live on Lemondstand and we are pleased with the outcome. The only downside that I could find with their system was, one definitely need a good programmer and web designer to design the store. Lot of tweaks and advance knowledge of bootstrap, twig and CSS is required if one is trying to do it by themselves. After putting lots of ice and lemon, served chilled, this lemonade is very delicious.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been developing stores on LemonStand since the beta version was released, and I have watched it grow, develop and then evolve into what it is now.What it is now, for me as a developer is an exciting platform that I intend to build a large proportion of my business on. Much of the features are what is expected of a standard eCommerce platform, they don’t throw the kitchen sink at it, they do things the right way. Layering the upgrades periodically when they are happy that what they are releasing is going to be well received.Jason Fried once spoke about Basecamp, and how they don’t say yes to every feature request they get, they do it when they feel there is a real need for it. I feel LemonStand adopt a similar approach.For me I wouldn’t recommend any other platform.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been a LemonStand user since 2011 and seen this product and company evolve over the years. The switch to the cloud was a hard hit at first but I think it was the right move. I think LemonStand is in a position where they will be able to supply core features faster than other hosted eCommerce platforms. This is based on what they have released in just the last year and how slow I have seen other systems add features. I have worked with a few others hosted platforms and it seems like they push a lot of functionality out into their respective apps stores. Depending on your store you end up playing way more for app add ons than the core license itself. I’m all for a LemonStand marketplace but I feel like you are getting and will continue to get better features in the core package from LemonStand. As a developer the lemonsync tool is amazing. Finally I can work on a theme locally and commit the code to version control!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I used Lemonstand for a holiday food drive we were holding at my company (Zendesk) and it was great! As a developer, I wanted something that wouldn’t take too long to get up to speed and give me a lot of customization power over the design of the site.After trialling several services, Lemonstand stood out since they had beautiful customizable templates, easy to understand documentation and all the backend features I needed (payment, inventory, integrations, etc).I was able to get most of my food drive store built over a weekend and went live after a week. If I had to build another online store, I would most likely use Lemonstand again.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My favourite ecommerce system to work with.Very customisable, clients find it super easy to use, and the support from the Lemonstand team is just brilliant. My clients prefer it over other platforms as there are no additional transaction fees on the lower plans unlike most other hosted ecommerce systems.I’ve designed & built sites on the original platform, and though I was a little concerned when transitioning to the new cloud platform Lemonstand have offered lots of support, regularly added new features, listened to feedback and made the new cloud platform better and better. If you are a designer or developer I couldn’t recommend Lemonstand more. If you want to set up and run your own store there are several great themes available to get you started too.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Does anyone here have any good Lemonstand Developers / Designers that you can recommend? Thank you.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jimmy, we can connect you with a web designer! Just email us at sales@lemonstand.com and we’ll help you out.
Thanks.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The support and customer care we get from Lemonstand is just incredible. We are out to build a really complex solution on the base of Lemonstand and we in almost every case found what we needed or found a solution out of the box. If the rare case happend, that there was no solution available, the customer support was really helpful, gave us advise on how we could a achieve what we wanted or even built in features we requested. And if they were not able to fastly implement features we demanded, they gave us an estimate on when it would be there.I have looked at many solutions, but Lemonstand is maybe not he most advanced, but by far the most customer friendly and customizable solution! I am really happy with the choice of going our way together with them!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve used a variety of ecommerce platforms in the past and am really impressed with Lemonstand’s ease of use and ability to customize. The template system is well organized and developer friendly.Whenever I have a question about how something works, the support team is quick to reply and helpful. They were even able to modify the API for me, which saved me from updating 750+ products manually. Speaking of API, it is robust and well documented, complete with a nice working example.From a developer perspective, the Lemonsync tool is super handy. A great time saver and well thought out touch that makes theming a breeze.The admin area is straightforward and easy to use, meaning clients can start managing their store immediately without a steep learning curve. Overall I’m very impressed with Lemonstand, and looking at the roadmap, it seems like it’s only going to get better.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Was introduced to Lemonstand through a client looking for an easy admin area to work with as they were nervous of the Magento beast and the over complicated Woo Commerce. Danny and his team have been nothing but helpful whenever we need them.Would be keen to see some more features in Lemonstand such as a WordPress style functionality so that we can give a client a full site from Lemonstand rather than having to bolt too different admin areas together but other than that, as an agency, we are very happy with the Lemonstand offering.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Meant to rate it at 5 stars in my comment above
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Having worked with other ecommerce platforms in the past I have to say that it has been a pleasure to build a site with Lemonstand. I like the way that it is organised into templates and uses Twig for tempting.In particular, the response from the support team whenever there has been a question has been fantastic and they have gone out of their way to help and response times have been very fast.When it came to the point at which the merchant needed to get involved and start adding products we simply pointed them to the back-end login, sent them a brief email to get them started and left them to it. Before we knew it they had added and configured products and uploaded images.Customising the domain and adding a SSL certificate was also very straightforward thanks to Danny & the team.Great product and we’ll definitely be looking for opportunities to use it again.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I was a beta tester for Magento Go when it was called Project Stratus, and had a shop with Go with nearly 10,000 skus. It was no surprise to me when eBay decided to close that program. It was a complete POS, and I don’t mean point of sale. My search for a new ecommerce solution led me to Lemonstand. I’m a designer, not a programmer, so Lemonstand’s vernacular took a little getting accustomed to. Now I appreciate how flexible and customizable their system is though. EVERYTHING is available for tweaking.Being as I am not a programmer, that also means I broke the code pretty regularly during setup. Lemonstand’s support was and continues to be, Johnny-on-the-Spot with assistance and the occasional repair. I must point out that this is NO SYSTEM for an ecommerce neophyte. If you need to get your grandpa’s BBQ recipe online, you might want to consider making a Paypal button. This software requires some serious setup. However, once it’s up and running… well, my customers and co-op members have been mentioning “how much EASIER the website is to use.” Lemonstand is pretty, functional, easy to use as a customer, and works like a champ. I am very pleased with the decision we made to transition to this SaaS platform.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are a 30 year old greeting card, gift and scrapbooking company and our business was established during the good old days when small, mom and pop retailers were thriving and consumers were shopping in unique brick and mortar stores for our products. Man-O-Man have things changed over the years! We have been blessed with a team of visionary employees and have worked successfully together to change our marketing model and meet the needs of our customers. We have had challenging experiences with e-commerce websites on both Yahoo! and Magento platforms. We still have 2 other sites (not LS) serving our wholesale and professional customers. We chose Lemon Stand for our retail site because it was the only platform we could find that allows us to offer tiered pricing on our cards to individual consumer shoppers. Since our launch with LS, greeting cards have consistently been our #1 selling item. We are currently on the Growth Plan and are super excited to migrate to Version 2. The most frustrating experience with other platforms has been trying to find someone to listen to our problems and needs and not finding the customer support and expertise we require. With our LS Growth Plan, we can pick up the phone and find a skilled, responsive, kind, patient and helpful person when we need them and that is priceless. Whoever trains the staff at LS deserves an award. The sense of partnership and excellence in customer service you have instilled in your team is commendable. We are just in the infancy of learning what LS can mean to the growth of our business and we look forward to an exciting and prosperous journey ahead.
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I came to LemonStand after 6 years on a slick custom-built platform that was coded entirely from scratch. There were no constraints with the custom platform, so you could say my expectations and standards were very high when I began shopping for another solution. I thoroughly evaluated at least 8 different eCommerce platforms, and LemonStand was the clear winner. Despite its minor flaws, I give LemonStand 5 stars because of the dedication to quality and long-term vision that is apparent in the product and the customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am a software engineer, just starting out with LemonStand, and this review if from a more technical perspective. I do not have experience with any other e-commerce products, so I can’t comment about how LS compares with it’s competitors.So far I’m really impressed with the product and the company. A few days ago Danny called me directly to see how my store was coming along, and offered to help in any way possible, and I’ve probably received 4-5 “how’s it going? / how can we help?” email messages. Absolutely incredible service, and I have no doubt that any support questions/issues I may have down the road will be handled above and beyond my expectations.The store HTML, CSS and PHP are customizable. Yes, you’ll need to hire someone to do this work if it’s not your area of expertise, but that fact that it can customized at all is a huge bonus. Of course you can use a pre-built ‘theme’ which requires little to no customization at all…so you get the best of both worlds. Personally, I using the “Boxie” theme (http://blog.lemonstand.com/introducing-boxie-a-clean-and-mobile-friendly-ecommerce-theme/) and making my own customizations from that solid foundation (mobile friendly and all).Although the code can be managed by logging into the Admin web-based interface, you technical folks will enjoy the ability to work locally using your own tools. Locally I am using a few Grunt modules to concatenate/minify/lint/etc my CSS and JS files. Then LemonStand’s awesome “LemonSync” tool (https://github.com/lemonstand/lemonsync) watches your local files for changes and sync’s them automatically back up to your store. I’m a LS newbie, but so far I really like what I’m seeing, and knowing what coming on their product roadmap (https://lemonstand.com/roadmap) is encouraging. Looking forward to working more with this product and company.
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All of the positive comments above are true. When I first read this review, I was skeptical. But, after “trialing” five shopping carts, including LemonStand, I must say that everything is true and then some. There’s no way they’ve had a customer more high maintenance than I, especially since I’m not a developer. But, their priority on customer support made set up and configuration a breeze. They were always available to answer questions and did so with lightening speed quickness. Regarding the statements about coding. True, any website is going to benefit from a good developer. But, I have zero prior experience with coding and that didn’t stop me from being able to build a professional, fully featured, modern looking website for my business. Of course, I was intimidated at first. But, the customer support I received helped me get over that pretty quickly.Do yourself a favor and start out with LemonStand. They really make the process super easy, have attractive and essential standard features already built in (no need for apps) and their customer support is unbeatable!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Having worked with most e-commerce carts from Magento to Shopify it has been a really nice change to use LemonStand.I like the fact that it is incredibly easy to customise, simple to use the backend and the support has been outstanding. It is perfect for a small store that I am currently working on and importantly features are being added swiftly, the API is great and tackling the important issues like European tax is a big win.
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Typo in first submittable. Can you please make the correction? Line 3 5 star – not 5 start.
Thank you – I hope
If not and this gets posted, for anyone who read my comment, I actually do know grammar and missed this on proof read.
DG
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I just spent weeks road testing the bulk of eCommerce programs available. Hands down the gang @ Lemonstand stand tall in the forest. The level of integrity, honesty about their product and how it can either fit or not fit for a specific business or business model is 5 start. The product isn’t for everyone, that is a given. But if you are looking for a program that can provide you with professional customer support, real people who care and a program that can grow with your company, this is the place. It isn’t designed for someone who just wants to set up a store to sell a few items or someone who is looking to not be actively involved in the development of the site and business. I would highly recommend giving the trial a run and you will be well served to have your developer or computer guru involved in the trial run. Good Luck with your venture. After our trial runs, we will go with Lemonstand when we launch.
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I’ve started out using the locally downloaded version of Lemonstand, and recently brought two sites to the web-based version. I was a bit anxious making the switch but the folks at Lemonstand made every effort to make it a smooth transition. The system is super flexible, setting up gateways and shipping is a breeze and works beautifully and most important to me, the customer server is fantastic. They get back to me often within minutes and have helped guide me tirelessly in making modifications to please every client. I will be using and recommending Lemonstand over and over again.
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Over the years, we’ve used a lot of different ecommerce tools, including having built our own. As it stands now, we are recommending Lemonstand for our all our clients projects. We’re really happy with the flexibility, ease of use, and customer support. We’re looking forward to using Lemonstand on our next project as well, which is about to kick off.
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Having used Lemonstand in the past with previous startups I’m beyond excited to make the move with Orivor from Shopify to Lemonstand. Danny has made the start to this transition as painless as possible by working with us at every step. Being able to discuss our needs in an e-commerce platform before subscribing is one example of how they will go above and beyond to be a value-add partner. If you’re in e-commerce you need to give Lemonstand a hard look.
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Lemonstand V1 user here. LS screwed all of the V1 users over. Pretty much dropping almost all support (after we were told that would never happen previously). Functionality we were promised never happened and some basic functionality (like product export that doesnt work) are completely missing.
Here I sit shopping for a new ecommerce software.
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I’ve been using LemonStand for many years, and through many updates and new features. I have rarely ever seen bugs or glitches, and those that have popped up are fixed immediately. It’s a stable, flexible, dynamic platform.I think the fact that proper designer should be hired to create your theme is a good thing. The template and asset system is super simple and intuitive, so it’s a low barrier of entry for a decent designer/dev to be hired and create a totally custom look easily. There’s enough solutions out there are provide canned designs but are impossible to customize.Great platform, completely superior customer service.
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Lemonstand has powered our clients’ online stores for over 2 years, and has proven to be a flexible and stable platform that can handle sites doing millions each year in sales.
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Having previously used Shopify, BigCommerce and Volusion, the switch to Lemonstand and its unmatched flexibility, customizability, and fantastic customer support has been a game changer!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Pros: Been working with their API recently, and gotta admit it’s probably one of the more well though out API’s I’ve used. The API docs are superb! One issue I have with it though is you can’t upload images for products.Cons: The admin area layout is pretty messy, and not very pleasing to the eye. It’s not mobile either, which is extremely annoying if you’re on a tablet or phone.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.