LemonStand - eCommerce Blog about LemonStand shopping cart, news and tutorials

Tier pricing for LemonStand licenses

0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Friday, July 30, 2010

We've introduced tier pricing on LemonStand licenses. That means the more licenses that you buy, the less you'll pay. Pretty simple, right? Well, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Tier pricing levels

Let's get right down to business. Here are the levels:

1	$299.98
2	$269.98
3	$254.98
4	$239.98
5	$224.98
6+	$209.98

You'll notice that each level gives you an additional 5% discount from the base price.

Window of 30 days

When purchasing a license, our system checks your history back 30 days and takes into consideration past orders. So if you order 1 license today, and another in 15 days, you'll pay $269.98 for the second.

Rewards for purchasing more at once

The nature of this system rewards people who buy licenses in bulk. For example, if you purchase 3 licenses at once, you'll pay $254.98 for each license. Whereas if you ordered 1 today, and 2 more in 15 days you would pay $299.98 for the first license and $254.98 for the second 2.

When you buy multiple licenses at the same time, you get the tier pricing discount on every license in your order.

What about referred orders?

Any licenses that you refer count toward your tier pricing discount. But we'll write a separate blog post explaining that in more depth soon.

LemonStand is now officially released

5 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Thursday, July 29, 2010

Today is a big day. LemonStand has come out of beta status and has officially launched.

For a while now, we've all considered LemonStand stable and proven. But now it's official.

Site updates

Along with release, this website has been updated to include the following:

The most interesting part of these updates is the My account area.

My Account area

From this area on the website, you can manage your previous orders, licenses, account details and password. You can also order new commercial or developers license.

You can even upgrade developers licenses to commercial licenses! This is done by clicking on the order, and paying for it either by credit card or PayPal.

Referral code

You'll also notice a referral code on the bottom right. If anyone enteres your unique referral code into our system while purchasing a license or signing up for a free developers license, it will be linked to your account and will count toward your tier pricing (if it's a paid order).

Referred licenses show up in your account, and you can see the license holder's name and license key. This is great if you want your customer to purchase a LemonStand license directly so they are the license holder.

What's coming next?

We'll be publishing more blog posts that describe other things, such as tier pricing and the free developers license.

Productivity Recipes of a Web Developer

3 Comment(s) | published by Aleksey B. on Friday, July 16, 2010

In this post I want to share my recipes that helped me to keep productive during the month and years I've been developing web applications. I have been developing web applications for more than 12 years and LemonStand has taken about 1 and a half years of this time. It is easy to get bored and loose concentration when working on something for such a long period of time. Of course, your positive feedback helps a lot, but there are also some simple methods of staying productive I learned during my experiences.

Be self-inspiring

Being self-inspiring means doing things in such a way that they inspire you and give you energy to carry on. I believe that each person has their own understanding of inspiration. As for me, the following things work the best.

When I'm developing a new feature I always draw a nice, detailed user interface in Photoshop before implementing it. It gives me the opportunity to have a rest from coding and switch to another type of activity. And when I return to coding I already have a detailed user interface mockup which inspires me to keep coding.

Write code properly. This is not only about how the code works and how graceful is it (this is a concern of any developer!), but also about code formatting. Everything should be in its right place and every line should be beautiful.

Everything should be in its right place and every line should be beautiful.

So, no tab/space mix for indentation, no triple line breaks, no ugly comments. A single block of poorly formatted or not properly thought out code can spoil everything that you write after it. If you allowed yourself to write bad code somewhere, you may begin thinking "OK, if it worked there, I don't need to care much about it here either". So, I'm always trying to be disciplined and to not allow myself many liberties when it comes to code quality. It helps me to keep the inspired feeling of knowing my work is high-end and squeaky clean at all times.

Keep the workspace clean

Any foreign objects in your working environment can kill productivity. Lose the dirty mugs, no heaps of papers and no other stuff which you don't need right now. I keep my desk as clean as possible, and it helps my thoughts to be clean and concentrated. To work I only need my old Mac Mini, a notebook and a pencil.

Use simple and inspiring tools

Today there are plenty of tools which can inspire you. Do not use a code editor which has an ugly user interface. Do not use any tools with ugly UI at all! I use TextMate for coding, because it has a simple interface and it is not bloated with features that stick out of every corner. I use Versions for managing my Subversion local copies. And I use a Mac, because it is both simple and inspiring. Each of these tools has many alternatives, but I chose them, because I'm the most productive with them.

Switch the activity type

Although there are people who think differently, switching the activity type during the day helps me stay efficient. When you do a specific type of work for many hours at a run you may begin losing the ability to think critically. I learned this through experience. During the day I usually change my activity type several times between customers support, coding, designing and physical exercise.

These methods have helped me be productive over the years and develop great products.

Are there recipes which help you? Please share them with us by leaving a comment below!

July 28 LemonStand Launch

5 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Wednesday, July 14, 2010

It's been a long and interesting road since we first started developing LemonStand. Our team has learned a lot and accomplished a lot since then.

The private Alpha program and subsequent public Beta test program has been a great experience. Because of it, LemonStand has become very stable, refined and feature rich. We have seen live eCommerce websites powered by LemonStand go live, with many more currently in development.

All in all, it's been an absolutely great experience!
And it's only just getting started!

Announcements

We are excited and proud to announce that LemonStand will be officially coming out of Beta status on July 28.

This website will be updated and expanded upon. Some of the things that you'll see are:

My Account area: purchase new licenses, review your orders, view current license information
Purchase licenses on behalf of your customers
Referral code (so your customers can buy a license directly that counts toward your tier pricing)
Tier pricing discounts
More information and screenshots

Get the Pre-order discount before it's over!

Because the beta is coming to an end, so is the pre-order discount. If you are already, or plan on, using LemonStand for a live website, now is definitely a good time to buy a license by pre-ordering.

You should have received a link to pre-order a license in the welcome message you got after ordering the Beta. If you haven't signed up for the Beta yet, but just want to get the discount... go ahead and sign up for the Beta then pre-order.

Live sites need a valid licenses

Part of the Beta terms of agreement was that it if you used it for a live website, you need to own a license by the time LemonStand is released out of the Beta status. If your Beta has not been upgraded by pre-ordering (or purchasing a license after the Beta is over) you will no longer be able to recieve software updates after July 28. We will contact you if it seems as though you're using the Beta for a live website and do not own a valid license yet.

If you only used the Beta to evaluate LemonStand, and have not actually used it on a live eCommerce website, then you are free to keep using it for that purpose.