LemonStand (Discontinued) vs. OpenCart

• Good alternative to Shopify and similar services.
• More than basic template adjustments will require programmer hours.
• If you want a slick store with great features LemonStand's for you.

Incentivized

OpenCart is best suited for business owners looking to sell their products online. Building an OpenCart website requires no or minimal coding knowledge. Being a self-hosted system, it is not recommended for people who have no hosting plan or have no experience in hosting websites so it would be better to go with another platform that is hosted elsewhere.

• LemonStand is cloud based on AWS.
• You get: Instant deployment whenever you choose to publish, automatic software updates, Site-wide SSL, and PCI/DSS compliant infrastructure.

Incentivized

• OpenCart is well suited in cases where our eCommerce web development clients want a very specific design with very specific shopping cart functionalities.
• OpenCart is very flexible in its native ability to work with a wide variety of payment processors and payment gateways.
• OpenCart makes it both fast and easy to setup and configure a new shopping cart website, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates.

Incentivized

• LemonStand has a limited number of templates. Each template has a different set of features that can be modified in the back office theme customization area.
• LemonStand claims their templates are highly customizable. To accomplish this, they expose individual web page code in page templates and widget blocks. These are windows into the template where you can modify, add and delete html code. However, as in all PHP/CSS/HTML templates, even those written with Twig as LemonStand templates are, the coding goes very deep through many files. I don't think it would be cost or time effective for a small company to attempt more than superficial customization. This is pretty much the same for Shopify and PrestaShop. As a store front and blogging platform, LemonStand is elegant but it is not a website development tool like Wix, Weeble or even Squarespace.
• LemonStand manages this expectation with excellent email support. There is no user forum and no third party templates for LemonStand, and this is a good thing. When I wanted to modify a specific aspect of the template, I emailed the issue/question to LemonStand support and consistently received advise including instructions on how to adjust the widget or exposed page code to resolve my problem.
• Documentation is out of date and could use a good proofread. Videos and tutorials are too simple to be really helpful.

Incentivized

• It's a very buggy platform. Although OpenCart developers release new versions time to time after fixing bugs every version of OpenCart has a different type of bug.
• It should increase the security of the platform.

Incentivized

I looked closely at every e-commerce product I could find.

• LemonStand had very high satisfaction from current users.
• Email support is polite, accurate and fast.
• Company is located in Canada.
• Refund policy appears to be ethical.
• Shopping experience is sharp! I like it a lot.

Incentivized

Honestly, when consulting my clients, I would always recommend WooCommerce over OpenCart. Although I've had clients that had existing OpenCart websites and they were fairly happy with them, making additions/changes/customizations from a developer standpoint was not the easiest compared to other systems. For very large shops, I always recommend Magento over anything else.

Incentivized

• I expect ease of use and mobile look and feel will increase customer sales.

Incentivized

• Clients loves the design which is easy to integrate to; you can integrate multiple themes.
• Overall user experience is good, so number of conversions is good.

Incentivized