LemonStand Blog

3 New Features to get excited about

1 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Tuesday, December 22, 2009

During the last month we have been working very hard on preparing LemonStand for the open beta test and the following release. While some tasks are in queue on our to-do list, we decided to share with you some great new features which we recently added to LemonStand.

1. CMS extensions - automatic navigation menus

We improved the LemonStand CMS engine by adding the page grouping feature. Now it is possible to maintain a page hierarchy by specifying a parent page when you create or modify a page. LemonStand can use this page hierarchy for dynamically building navigation menus. It enables you to create site maps, menus and breadcrumbs, which are updated automatically when you change the page hierarchy. In our usual style, we do not impose any limits on the HTML markup generated by LemonStand for your navigation menus. The feature uses partials, which are the core component of the templating engine. This allows you to issue any HTML markup for the navigation with very simple API calls.

2. Better protection on shared hosting environments

LemonStand can now be installed using the command-line installer. It gives the application better protection, especially on the shared hosting environments where all application files are owned by the account user, and the web server doesn't need to have writing permissions on the application files and directories. Therefore, there is only one user who can modify LemonStand files - the owner of the hosting account. To some this might seem like overkill, but we're striving to create the best shopping cart available.

3. Configurable checkout process

The checkout process in LemonStand is now flexible and can be implemented in various ways. If you run a local store and ship only to local customers, you probably do not need ask your customers to specify the country and state during the checkout process. If credit card is the only payment method you accept, then you probably don't need to ask the customer to select the payment method. So that step could be removed from the checkout process. The same thing goes for shipping - the step for shipping method selection could also be removed from the checkout process. You can even implement a one-click checkout! This gives you ample opportunities in customize the checkout process and implement unique scenarios.

LemonStand gets more exciting each day as the platform matures and is refined. Very soon you'll be able to download the public beta, so keep checking back for updates and join the community.

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LemonStand Discount Engine

4 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Thursday, December 03, 2009

Yesterday we finished developing the discount engine. The discount engine is the last large-scale feature which we planned to implement before the 1.0 release and now we are entering the final straight. We still have a number of minor features to add, and much testing to conduct before the release date, but the real excitement is very close now.

What is the Discount Engine?

The discount engine allows you to put discounts on your products without altering the original product prices. Usually you would to do this when promoting products or running marketing campaigns, such as Christmas Sales.

The discount engine allows you to manage product prices on the catalog level and on the shopping cart level. Also, LemonStand allows you to create tier prices, and as consequence have different product prices for different customer groups.

Managing product tier prices

With the tier price feature you can specify a product price based on quantities and for different customer groups. Even if you don't want to provide price tiers for a product, you can use this feature for creating different prices for different customer groups, by specifying 1 in the tier Quantity field. Thus, depending on the group of a customer which views the product, LemonStand will display different product price in the catalog.

According to the tier prices configuration displayed in the image above, the price for guest customers is 26 USD. For wholesale customers the price is 16 USD until the customer adds 5 or more units of the product to the shopping cart. Then the price will be 10 USD. For all other customer groups LemonStand will use the base product price: 25 USD in this case.

Catalog level price rules

Catalog level price rules allow you to manage product discounts independently on the customer shopping cart content. You can create rules like this: “Discount products which name contains hat by 10%”. You can create complicated conditions for applying the rules, using a handy visual tool. Conditions can be simple, like in the previous example, or compound: “product name contains hat and product category is not either Art or Photography”.

You can enable the catalog price rules only for specific customer groups, or limit the rule action by a specific period of time, allowing you to create seasonal discounts for example.

You can apply multiple price rules at the same time. Price rules are applied in the order which you specify in the price rules list. You can reorder rules by dragging them up and down in the list.

Shopping cart level price rules

Shopping cart level price rules allow you to apply discounts to specific products, or on a whole shopping cart, depending on the shopping cart contents and other conditions. Examples of these conditions could be the selection of a payment or shipping method, a presence of specific items in the shopping cart, subtotal amount and other conditions.

You can assign a coupon code to a shopping cart price rule. In this case the rule will be activated only if the customer provides the corresponding coupon code. Also, you can specify how many times a coupon code can be used, and how many times the rule can be used for a single customer.

Similarly to the catalog price rules, you can specify which customer groups the shopping cart price rules are active for, and limit its action with a time interval.

Extendibility

As with all other things in LemonStand, the discount engine is extendible. It is possible to add new condition types, and actions. It could be very helpful if you have a complicated business model and it is simpler to express a discount condition with two lines of PHP code than by building a complex compound condition in the user interface.

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LemonStand is in pre-beta

3 Comment(s) | published by Halarewich D. on Tuesday, November 10, 2009

We invited a very small group of participants for a pre-beta testing bonanza. The intention was to find and fix any issues that would have put the public beta off to a bad start.

The pre-beta test group was invite only. We brought in people that seemed most excited about LemonStand mainly by monitoring what people were saying on Twitter, Facebook and other channels.

Current Status

"Your backend is just amazing and we are truly humbled at the opportunity to use your software even before the release...

We spent quite a bit of time yesterday on the backend and it’s amazing reporting features. They were just incredible. We really liked the fact that it is easy to use and the charts are just outright fabulous."

- Joe Praveen

It has only been open for about 2 weeks, and we have already fixed several issues related to installation, server compatibility and the general licensing procedures. So we feel that things are going quite well.

Everyone participating has been providing great feedback thus far. While we have not seen any of the testers creations using LemonStand yet, we know it's going to be very interesting once these sandbox sites start popping up because of the talent we have on board already.

We have around 10 people/companies on board right now.

Thank you to the pre-beta participants

Your feedback, bug reports and questions have been extremely valuable. We would like to thank you. Some of these include Incognito, LOUD! Creative, Mack Richardson, Fair Trade Jewllery, Political Pixel, Torpedo Juice, Seventhfury, Rachel Greaves, OnWired, ElectricPulp and Squared Eye.

And for all the rest of you...

We have recieved outstanding support from the online community so far. From getting showcased in design inspiration sites, CSS galleries and having blog articles writen about us, it's all very humbling. We also want to say thanks to everyone who has connected with us over Twitter and Facebook to help us spread the word.

We're working very hard on getting the initial issues out of the way so that we can release the public beta. The pre-beta group is pushing us along now, so we don't anticipate there to be many more obvious issues. And once all these issues are resolved, we'll release the public beta.

We encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates, and also get in on our email list (to the right). You won't want to miss this.

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New Products and Orders RSS feeds

1 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Friday, October 30, 2009

We just added two RSS channels to LemonStand – one for the order list and another for the new product list.

Recent Orders RSS channel

The Orders RSS feed is available for LemonStand users that have permission to work with the order list in the LemonStand Administration Area. You can subscribe to the feed by clicking the RSS link above the order list. The feed is protected, so authentication is needed in order to view the feed content. Your feed reader application will ask you to enter your user name and password. You would use the same credentials as you use for logging into the Administration Area.

The feed contains a list of recent orders. Each entry in the feed contains an order description, order number, creation date and time, customer description and a list of order items. You can click the link inside the feed entry to open the Order Preview page in a browser.

New products RSS channel

Using this feature you offer a New Products feed on your store website for customers. The implementation is very simple, just create a new page and call the Shop_Product:get_rss() method. The feed contains a list of recently added products. For each product its title, description, product image (if available) and a link to the product details page are presented.

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