LemonStand was an eCommerce platform bulit for professionals with features such as design fliexiblity and checkout customization. LemonStand was acquired by Mailchimp March 2019, and June 2019 LemonStand was discontinued.
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Shopify
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
Shopify performs a great marketing influence by having ads and different kinds of branding on various social media. Also, their utilities promotion creates a great impact on the people's mind, and after executing action on the platform, in my experience I liked it how …
Shopify allowed us to handle matrix items and combined listings. Both of which we could not do on our previous platform. There was some customization involved but overall, it did what we needed it to. The one downside was that if we want to change anything we would have to reload the entire set of matrix items manually.
It's base security and integration with trusted security partners (such as NoFraud) is a game-changer when it comes to reliability and a "hands off approach" for our IT department. The up-time is also very good.
It offers a wide range of verified plugins that are (for the most part) easy to install and use for any specific scenario you're looking for.
It's Analytics area in the admin is actually nice and offers a wide variety of reports that you can run.
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.
I would love it if Shopify built an in house app which helped us post UGCs and social proof from platforms such as Instagram, Youtube etc. more seamlessly on our website. Right now, we are able to do it through third party apps but the look and feel is just okay.
Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!
It is fairly easy to use Shopify regardless of what task you are attempting to perform. Most things are customizable to a degree without requiring coding ability. I have very limited coding experience and have still been able to navigate my way around changing features of the website that require edits to the code with the use of AI and trial-and-error. This previously wasn't possible with the WooCommerce platform.
In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward
Shopify offered us several trainings to setup a Shopify store, how to build a brand, SEO, product photography etc. All this content have been super helpful in our journey.
Big Commerce and SAP Hybris are two other platforms we've investigated and Shopify is by far easiest to use and customize. While it doesn't do everything out of the box, the apps do fill in many gaps. The cost however, is probably the biggest selling point against these other two options.
It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.
