Likelihood to Recommend 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. Read full review The fact of Wix moving away from their ADI web-building tool in favour of Editor, in my opinion, makes a huge mess of everything. I feel a lot of the ease and automation of designing my website has gone to such an extent that I now "recommend" Wix only for professional developers. Worse is that I have to redesign a big part of my website as items are now linked to each other in a different way than used to be the case. In my opinion, A big ZERO for Wix, who clearly should do their homework again.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Easy to create and duplicate website, and web pages for similar products, services and campaigns, so you do not have to start from scratch Find features such as video, image and button, and templates to customise your website's feel and look. For example, recently, I was able to add a countdown timer for the sale of tickets to our online conference. Creating website Anchors - making it easy for you to take a visitor to a particular part of a page so that they do not need to scroll through the entire webpage making it more user-friendly. The SEO part of Wix makes it easy for you to set up meta data, create fully functional social media shares that are on brand and looks professional in the Google search engine.. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review One place where Wix falls short of other CMS's is with insights and analytics. On other platforms, I can instantly see how many page views I received, what time the pages were viewed, location, etc. But seeing this information on Wix requires a Google Analytics integration that is not automatically included when you make an account. You have to first go to Google Analytics to make an account, then come back to Wix to activate the integration, it's a little time-consuming for a feature that most CMS's come with instantly. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We will definitely renew Wix. The ability to completely control our website has been invaluable to us. We will maintain this service as long as we are an incorporated organization, we've tried several other software options and this has been the best solution by far for all of our needs.
Read full review Usability Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.
Read full review Performance Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.
Read full review Support Rating As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.
Read full review Implementation Rating Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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. Read full review Wix is a great starting platform for anyone looking to create a website. It definitely holds its own against any other all in one website creation platform. The one thing I would say is if your main focus is solely on eCommerce you may be better off using something like
Squarespace which is specifically designed for that market.
Read full review Scalability I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.
Read full review Return on Investment I expect ease of use and mobile look and feel will increase customer sales. Read full review The data-driven, dynamic pages will eliminate an entire part of our event launch process. Multiplied across 60 events, over several years, that will save us a ton of time but also vastly increase the quality of our presentation. The data-driven pages will also give us the ability to archive past events and radio shows in an easily searchable manner. This will be helpful for us when it comes to booking new events as well. (It has been no small feat for me to figure out the code to get this all working, though!) This new site will reflect our brand and organization vastly better than our old site. It will make our organization appear much more professional and legitimate. Read full review ScreenShots