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Has anyone ever heard of this upstart software, new to me anyways?
http://lemonstandapp.com/
It’s a smart looking site, that always goes a little ways to get me to digging deeper. It says there is a beta download coming soon…
Just started looking around, give me a shout if you’ve heard any scuttle-butt on this one 😉

It appears to be a product of http://www.limewheel.com

Haven’t heard of this myself, but looks very promising. Definitely keeping an eye on this product.

Saw it a few months ago when they first put their site up.  It looks interesting.  The demo wasn’t up before so its nice to see how it actually works a bit.  I could see it being useful for a few projects I’ve had on the back burner for awhile.

Jamie

First time I hard of it…
Looks very nice, especially small CMS-like attached to processing logic and pages.
But it really reminds me of slim down version of EE and Simple Commerce with PayPal…a bit of FieldFrame Marix.
I don’t see why you can’t build this now with EE; other than their ‘reports’ section they don’t seem to offer much more value.

The Dashboard reports section screens really reminded me of Google Analytics reports charts. If GA has an API it just might be that stats are from Google, and the only payment gateways in the demo seem to be PayPal settings. hmmm…

Exactly 😉

One thing I really like about it is it seems they are going to offer PayPal Pro integration which is really nice.

Looks quick and easy.

I don’t have much to compare too though,

the one I have used in the past is Interspire Shopping Cart and have liked its advanced tools.

Please let me know if you try it!

Hi Everyone,

Came across this thread, so thought I would respond to things that looked like questions.

As you probably can tell, LemonStand is first and foremost an eCommerce system. While we strive to keep things simple and easy to use, it does include many features specific to online merchants. It can sell downloadable products, services, etc. It supports product options, extras, attributes and more. I know this terminology does not mean much, so I encourage you to play around with the demo.

I can’t speak about EE + Simple Commerce however, as I am not familiar with this combination.

LemonStand’s real talent is in design flexibility. Most shopping carts are real messy to deal with when it comes to integrating a nice design. LemonStand does away with that and allows you to output any HTML you want for your store. You have the option of being a purist and editing your HTML by hand for pages, or using WYSIWYG content blocks (1 or more per page) if you like.

@Crssp-ee: GA does not have an open API for fetching data. Instead, LS “logs into” your account and “downloads the XML data”. It parses the data and prepares a flash based chart. The chart displays visits and revenue in a way that GA does not do. So LS is not an extra interface for the same old GA data.

Even with eCommerce features enabled in GA, LemonStand provides more accurate data and in real time, which is important to most store owners.

PayPal is the only payment gateway available because we aren’t even in beta stage yet. The final product will have support for the most common payment gateways.

But something to note is that LS is very modular and has a simple but powerful API. Support for additional payment gateways (along with extended features) can and will be developed by us and the community in the form of modules. We plan to support our community strongly by giving them channels to buy/sell modules they have developed.

More details on these things will be revealed as development continues. We are working hard to release the beta and then version 1.0 of LemonStand afterward.

limewheel,

I’d be interested in knowing if your API would allow for alternate membership handling.  It would be cool if the membership stuff could be handled by EE while LemonStand handled the payment and product data.

Additionally it would be interesting to know if it would be possible to abstract the payment, product listing, and shopping cart features of LemonStand so that an EE module could be developed that allowed those to be used within EE templates.  Obviously, we use EE here and for us we don’t need the flexible template system you have for handling the style of the pages as we already have the best system we’ve ever run into for doing just that.

We’ve, here at the forum, been waiting for something that allows for simpler commerce and anything that makes our lives easier and integrates with EE is big thing for us.

Jamie

For a simple eCommerce site, I don’t see any benefit in trying to mesh EE with LemonStand. Why use 2 systems when 1 will accomplish everything you need?

It’s a different story if you get into some specific features that you want to use EE for which LemonStand does not address.

Of course you want to continue using EE, since you’re on this forum. EE is a great CMS by the way. We personally love it. But it’s not an eCommerce system specifically and is obviously not going to be as robust in that area. They are different animals completely and not comparable.

What you wondered about using the API to allow EE to handle user accounts may be possible, but it depends on the level of integration you had in mind. I would encourage you to explore this when the beta or final version is released if you’re interested.

Well, I guess I’m not talking about a “simple” eCommerce site.  Most of the sites I run are fairly complex and LemonStand’s CMS features are not up to the task.  However, EEs commerce abilities aren’t enough either so it would be nice to meld the two in those ways.  I likewise wasn’t attempting to compare them.  Rather I wanted to know how they might work together.

I’ll take a look at the API stuff when you release a beta and see how it looks.

Jamie

Just wanted to respond to your comment about LemonStand’s CMS features not being up to the task:

LemonStand is not even beta yet. The feature set is not finalized, so I find it hard to understand how you might have come to this conclusion. To determine these things you would first need to have some requirements in regards to the CMS features your site requires. You could then evaluate the system once you’re able to get your hands on a final version and have some documentation in-hand.

It might make more sense to develop a module for LS to extend the CMS features for your specific needs, rather than grafting two different systems into one.

As mentioned, we’ll be paying attention to our community and will actively develop modules to add specific functionality for the people that need it. In turn, our customers can develop modules and will be able to sell and market them through channels we’ll provide.

I can’t imagine LemonStand comparing well to EE in terms of general CMS abilities.  And the sites I run are usually already copies of EE that have been extended in many ways.  Trying to make LemonStand do the things no matter how many features you end up with and how well you listen to users just doesn’t sound like something in the realm of possible regardless of the status of anything on your end.  I’m not making a comparison.  I’m using simple logic based on the fact that I know to ship things you will have to limit your feature set at some point or it will never get done.  😊  I’m not making a negative judgment in any way.  Just trying to think, out loud, about how your product might be useful to me.  Make sense?

Jamie

Makes total sense. And you’re right, we don’t intend on competing with EE via our LemonStand product.

But is having every single features that EE does really the requirement? I doubt it, and that is why I said it would make sense to evaluate your specific requirements and then evaluate what can be accomplished out of the box, and what might need custom modules.

If the difference was too great between what’s “possible” and your requirements, then the solution is not right for you, plain and simple.

We aren’t out to try and create a beast of a system with a million features. That just results in bloatware. So on that level I agree with your statement about it being “possible”. However, LemonStand is built so that it could be extended in almost any way through custom modules. So with some custom development, and the use of existing modules (which the number will increase as time goes on after release) it is certainly possible to create the functionality that EE is capable of. Whether it is worth the labor, makes sense for the particular project, or what modules will be developed and when is another topic.

But the fact remains, it is possible.

Out of the box? Even though you have not described your requirements, it sounds like it won’t. Using some custom development? Of course it’s possible. There is nothing limiting you from doing almost anything.

That all being said, it seems a little silly to be discussing these things at the moment. The proof is in the lemonade and we’re working hard to give you a big glass of it. So thanks for your interest and keep an eye on our blog or subscribe to our email list for announcements.