Driven by their once-pricey proprietary shopping cart engine, LemonStand today has an online service to rival the major players in the market, with a user interface that makes it easy to set up your store according to your preferences.

LemonStand review: in a nutshell

LemonStand is a complete, hosted e-commerce platform. You don’t have to take care of any technical aspects of the platform other than signing up for a free trial and adjusting the main parameters of your online store inside the dashboard.

That being said, if you’re an advanced user, you also get full access to design customizations, API, customizable checkouts, and more.

Basically, LemonStand gives you access to a complete set of e-commerce features that you might need, and then lets you adjust them to your liking.

Who’s LemonStand best suited for?

Even though the setup is very straightforward, the pricing model (more on that in a minute) and the range of features offered in LemonStand make it clear that it’s mostly a solution for stores that are already growing and have a pre-built customer base.

LemonStand is also a good choice for store owners that want to be able to customize every little detail about their e-commerce presence.

As your store grows and your needs change, LemonStand lets you modify various aspects of the platform to make everything fit hand-in-glove. At the same time, this means that you need developer’s help if you want to use the platform effectively long term.

Features in LemonStand

Some of the main features in LemonStand:

• Fully 100% customizable design.
• No transaction fees.
• Coupon codes and discounts.
• Custom SSL support.
• Advanced SEO features.
• Mobile-ready storefront designs.
• Customizable checkout.
• Scalable hosting.
• Various payment options (including Bitcoin).
• Unlimited product variants and product categories.
• Customizable email templates.
• Sell digital products, subscriptions and wholesale products.
• Advanced analytics.
• Advanced order workflows.
• Automated inventory management.
• Shipping and taxes.
• Social media support.
• Developer-friendly API.

LemonStand review: pricing

There are 3 main pricing plans with LemonStand:

Plus, there’s also the cheapest option: Startup – $49 / month.

If you don’t plan to exceed 200 orders / month then the Startup plan will be enough for you. If you are, the Professional plan will give you all the standard features and raise the order limit to 400 / month.

The online store designs in LemonStand

LemonStand offers a nice catalog of designs that render well on both desktop and mobile. This should make your customers quite happy, especially since mobile e-commerce traffic is huge these days.

You also get access to advanced customization possibilities. For example, apart from things like changing the logo and the colors, you can even adjust your template’s default files and use your own versions instead.

Managing products in yourLemonStand store

The product management module / catalog is very easy to grasp, and everything is accessible from a single screen.

Each product gets a range of settings and attributes, but luckily, you don’t have to fill out everything if there’s no use for you in doing so.

For more advanced setups, you can add your own parameters, attributes and product variants.

When it comes to online payments, LemonStand lets you integrate your store with a nice number of popular payment gateways and external solutions. You can basically collect payments via anything from PayPal, to credit cards, to Bitcoin.

Review conclusion

Is LemonStand the right tool to launch your online store with?

Pros of LemonStand

• Strong Multi-App Integration: One of LemonStand’s main benefits is the ease with which it can integrate with other third-party web apps. Whatever you are looking to make your LemonStand store do, it should be easy to find the function within LemonStand itself, or to hook up with a third-party app so your site can be entirely tweaked to suit your needs.
• Wide Range of Payment Processors: There are a wide range of payment processors that can easily stitch on to your LemonStand site, giving your customers the broadest possible array of payment methods. Unsupported payment methods can be off-putting to customers, and will damage your conversion rates – by being able to support more different payment types, you will improve the number of successful purchases.
• Personalized Customer Support: No matter your knowledge or prior experience, you have access to personalized customer support with LemonStand – perfect for getting your store up and running, or resolving issues that may arise.

Cons of LemonStand

• Work in Progress: LemonStand is still something of a work in progress. While developments are a good thing, there are still some areas of LemonStand being built out and improved, and this can be frustrating for those who have specific features and functions in mind. However, in fairness to LemonStand, these additional features do add value, and they are constantly being built out, but this can feel limiting for some users.
• Pricing: LemonStand costs money on a monthly basis and at a transactional level, so it’s important to price this in to your calculations when setting profit margins, etc. This is still much less than was previously the case, thanks to their switch to a SaaS model, but it’s a pricing structure that must be factored in to the equation when deciding whether LemonStand is best for your needs.
• Not the Best Solution for Tiny Shops: LemonStand is built to be inherently scalable, and aims squarely at e-commerce stores that are already growing. Unfortunately for smaller or brand new shops, LemonStand isn’t always the easiest or cheapest to use, and many prefer other applications for getting smaller shops moving.