[fullphat]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to leave some feedback on my experience with LemonStand so far. We're currently looking to move all our e-commerce sites to a new platform.

After testing the developer license and having a look around I love the whole design side of things, it works really nicely. "Skinning" the site has been a pleasure to do.

I started to notice though that functionality wise there is so much missing, like simple functions which from my experience have been a basic feature on all the carts we've tested, like the inability to set a sale price on individual items, multi-currency support and the inability to make the surrounding of the thumbnails another colour other than white (this pretty much limits us to just making white sites?). These are just a few things Ive found whilst working in a my first few days.

I can 100% see the model you are going for but when support tickets always say to install a custom module or a work around like saving images in a different format (my clients wont want to go through 1000's of products and save them as png's) I think you need to re-think this setup, the marketplace doesn't contain enough to justify this, for designers like myself we may as well not pay £200 for a license if we're just going to have to employ coders to build modules all the time, doesn't this sort of defeat the object of a pre-built cart? If the marketplace was bulging with these that would be fine and we'd buy them, but it's not yet.

I know I could have checked the above on your developer version and it's my fault for not spotting that they were not available but I just wanted to leave the above as feedback as i think this could be amazing, whilst the community is so small though and you have minimal modules I don't think the "build a custom module" path will work.

I hope this is taken as good feedback, I just wanted to let you know my thoughts as a designer (not a coder) that works on 25+ e-commerce sites a year with the team we have.

Keep up the good work

Martin

[activeholdingco]

Hello Martin,

Im a Lemonstand Developer here and I thought I would give you my opinion. Ive worked on half a dozen Lemonstand implementations and will be working on eventually migrating over many other stores I setup in a different platform before Lemonstand was around.

I understand where you are coming from when it comes to missing features, but I respectfully disagree. Every single client I have had has needed different functionality from the platform that was missing. I don't really see this as missing functionality but a unique requirement. You can set discounts on individual products through the discount area. You can also have a design that works with any colors (as seen in the customer gallery). I realize that some of the solutions are not the most ideal but they do accomplish the task. The one major difference between Lemonstand and all other carts is that Lemonstand pushes updates almost daily.

Building modules and employing coders in my opinion is what Lemonstand is all about. The software is so robust you can accomplish almost anything. The software is never going to fit every single unique use case so what they have done is provided a great platform to expand upon. Some of this functionality you mentioned could be easily added with a few lines of code and run you less than $50. There is in fact a thriving community around Lemonstand, but not easily noticed on the Forums. Ive also seen a few stores accomplish Multi-Currency with Lemonstand so far.

There is a whole list of things that I wish Lemonstand had that I also feel is missing, but really it just comes down to my unique use case. With enough support around these unique use cases, Lemonstand will eventually add it to core. I've been working with Lemonstand since it came out of Beta so if you ever have any questions about anything Lemonstand related feel free to email me at evocore [at] gmail.com. Id be glad to help you out with something I may have already accomplished before or let you know what kind of time it would take to build something.

[fullphat]

Hi,

We've just been asking a developer in the UK to build us some modules to go on Marketplace to fix what we believe should go on there.

I'll fire you an e-mail now with some ideas I have for modules to see if you can get us some costings together.

Cheers
Martin

[Eric]

Thanks for the critique. We're always aiming to improve the platform. Please cast your vote for most desired features in the Marketplace Ideas area.

fullphat, on 26 January 2012 - 01:47 AM, said:

inability to set a sale price on individual items

You can do so in the Discounts area.

fullphat, on 26 January 2012 - 01:47 AM, said:

inability to make the surrounding of the thumbnails another colour other than white (this pretty much limits us to just making white sites?)

No. Use Shop_Product::image_url third parameter ($as_jpeg). Set it to false, and it will be PNG. As mentioned in your topic, the IM module could do it. Yes that means IM would be required, but in my honest opinion GD quality is horrible, and it's best to be using IM anyway. We've been doing transparent backgrounds since before release (that wasn't the IM module's intention). It should be fairly evident browsing the Showcase.

fullphat, on 26 January 2012 - 01:47 AM, said:

If the marketplace was bulging with these that would be fine and we'd buy them, but it's not yet.

Right, and we and other developers are working on that every day. Yes there are a few things missing, but a lot less than there was before it, and it hasn't been around long. I believe within the next year we will be nearly there. There's a lot of great stuff in development right now.

fullphat, on 26 January 2012 - 01:47 AM, said:

multi-currency support

There's a few developers working on generic multi-currency. Whether by them or by LS, we should see it within a year.

[fullphat]

No problem Eric,

We'll have to wait and see, ill consult the clients and see if they can wait the year for Multi Currency.

I suppose some of this is born from my frustration of clients tight deadlines and me trying to pick this up as quickly as possible, literally everything ive done hasn't worked, from the install (because of the terms file being down), to the contact module, to the installer, to the time difference which can't be helped, it's just been a lengthy process to get to this stage.

Ill stick at it and well see what happens, I look forward to a long life on the forum, who knows, I may be able to spread what I've picked up in a years time!

[apepp]

...yeh, lets not forget that Lemonstand has come along way since late 2010 and that isn't that long ago in my opinion...

...i'm not the best coder in the world by any means, but having tried magento, i have to say I'm far more taken by Lemonstand to be honest...in the same amount of time i fumbled (and punched holes in the wall) with magento, i got a lot further in lemonstand...

...and this is coming from a real e-commerce novice, let me tell you!