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The Power of Reports in LemonStand

0 Comment(s) | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Everybody seems to love the visual reports in LemonStand. But do you realize the real power of the reporting features in LemonStand? I want to reveal some tricks that you may not know about.

Filters

You can find filters above some lists in LemonStand - for example, above the product and order lists. Although the filtering feature is not a visual report, it is a reporting function, because it helps you narrow down data lists and find specific information. Using filters you can limit the product list by manufacturer or product category. The nice thing is that you can apply multiple filters simultaneously. For example, you can ask LemonStand to display all products from a specific category, produced by specific manufacturers.

Or if you deal with the order list, you can configure filters to display all new orders made by registered users, which contain items of goods or downloadable product type.

Visual reports

Visual reports represent your sales information as charts. The Reports menu contains reports provided by all LemonStand modules. At the moment only the Shop module supplies reports. But in the future other modules may introduce additional reports.

Some reports can display data in different modes - as a line chart, pie chart and bar chart. The line chart is handy when you want to track the dynamics of something, for example how the order totals progresses over time. The line chart mode is available for all reports, while the pie and bar charts are available only for some of them. This is due to the nature of the types of data being displayed. It wouldn't make sense to preview order totals as a pie chart. But it is handy to see a pie chart when you analyze sales distribution among different manufacturers.

You can select a report using the sidebar menu of the Reports page. Right now there are 7 different reports in LemonStand:

Orders - displays sales data independently on ordered items.
Products - display sales distribution of individual products. You can display subtotals, assigned to specific products or number of items sold.
Categories - displays performance of product categories based on total products ordered or order subtotals within the categories.
Groups - displays sales distribution of custom product groups. You can create groups of non-related products (we call such groups custom product groups in LemonStand) in order to analyze sales information assigned with these groups. Product groups can be used for things such as "Featured Products" on your homepage or anywhere else.
Product Types - displays sales distribution between different product types. You can compare order totals between downloadable and physical products for example.
Manufacturers - this report displays sales information between the entered manufacturers.
Coupon Usage - displays sales distribution among coupons. Orders and Coupon Usage reports are order-centric reports. They can display revenue and order totals information, while other reports are product-centric and can display only subtotals assigned to specific products in orders.

In reports, filters work in the same way as they work in lists. You can narrow down displayed information and limit a number of displayed records. For example, if you have many products, when you open the Products report, you could see something like this:

You can fix the report by selecting specific products in the product filter. Click the product link in the Report Filters area and select products which you want to see on the chart. Alternatively you can limit the data by a specific product group or with any other filter.

A fiew more tips

You can change the chart height by dragging the grey bar which is below the chart area. It is especially helpful when you work with pie charts.
It is possible to export orders and customers corresponding to a current report configuration to CSV files.
The drop-down menus on the left above the chart area allow you to select which information you want to preview (for example - tax value, or number of items sold), and whether you want to see all orders or only paid orders (i.e. orders which have a Paid status in the status history).

Try them out for yourself

You can try these reports out using simulation data in the live demo of LemonStand. Let us know what you think!

Product and Customer CSV Import

0 Comment(s) | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, March 03, 2010

We recently published the Product and Customer CSV Import features. These features allow you to import product and customer records from CSV files, previously created in another application. We have successfully tested the product import with a Magento CSV file, exported from a live Magento store. The product import feature even allows you to import product images, if you have a corresponding column in the CSV file, and a ZIP archive containing the images.

Besides the most obvious usage of importing data from other applications, the Product Import feature can make populating your product catalog a breeze - rapidly create multiple products in Excel (or compatible), save as a CSV file and import into LemonStand all within a few minutes.

The CSV Import feature is somewhat complicated, and the main issue is matching columns in the CSV file to columns in LemonStand tables. On the other hand, the feature should be simple to use, in order to make migration from other eCommerce applications to LemonStand as simple as possible. We developed a user interface which allows you to match columns by dragging them. We also used custom scroll bars, because the defaults are too heavy for the lightweight user interface. The CSV Import user interface is implemented as a behavior (a feature of the LemonStand programming framework) and can be used for other cases where we need to import data from a CSV file.

In order to simplify CSV Import tasks, we added the Load and Save Column Configuration features, which allow you to save matched columns into a file and then re-use it, or share with other LemonStand users. We prepared two configuration files for importing products and customers from Magento (use right click/Save File As menu to download files):

If you haven't already, you can update your LemonStand beta installation and these features will become available automatically. Happy importing!

Beta Buzz

1 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Tuesday, February 23, 2010

More and more web designers and developers are gradually becoming aware of LemonStand's existence. This has led to some great reviews, screencasts and interviews coming out.

Here are a few that we wanted to mention.

Video Review on Practical eCommerce

Practical eCommerce published a review of LemonStand beta on their website that includes a video. Armando does a great job running through the application and highlighting the juicy areas.

Armando mentioned packing slips and invoices. These features have not been integrated yet, but they are coming and will be completed before version 1 releases.

LemonStand Under the Covers Review

Bruce Alderson did a brief review of LemonStand, covering the areas that he found most useful and interesting. Concise and to the point, Bruce includes some code examples that drive the message home.

You can read that review here.

Interview with Danny Halarewich

I did a Q&A with Bruce that included several questions about LemonStand. It also covered some other questions relating to design, life and business in general. This interview was later published on Techvibes as well.

Update: Audio Interview

I recently did an audio interview with Armando that was published on the eCommerceDeveloper.com website. The entire discussion revolved around LemonStand. Check it out here!

CMS Import & Export

3 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Friday, February 12, 2010

One particular feature that is especially useful for web designers and developers is Import/Export within the CMS.
This allows you to create templates, pages, set up your partials and supporting resources. Then, you could export all of this work to a file with an .lca file extension. Upon importing this file back into a LemonStand installation, of your templates, pages, partials and resources will be restored.
This is very handy for many different things. Here are a few scenarios:

You are building a site in a development environment, and want to port over your pages from there to a fresh LemonStand install on your production environment.
You just completed a client project, and before handing over the keys you use this to backup just the CMS objects in case of emergency
You're starting a project that is similar to another project you have already completed. To get a head start, you can export the CMS objects from the original project and import them into the new project.
You have created a generic LemonStand theme and want to distribute it. You export this theme to the .lca file and others can enjoy the fruits of your labor by importing it into their LemonStand installations.

There are many other uses for this feature, but the point is that you will probably find it quite convenient.

How to use the CMS import/export feature

This short guide assumes that you have already created your pages in LemonStand.

Exporting CMS objects

To export your CMS objects, simply log into the administration area of your LemonStand installation and navigation to CMS / Import or Export / Export.

Select which objects you would like export using the check boxes. Click the "Export" button and wait until the save file dialog window pops up for you. Save the file (it should have an .lca file extension) in a safe and memorable location for later use.

You'll notice that you can export only the objects you want. for example, you can export everything except resources. You could then distribute the resources manually, as the actual files. The application of this will depend on your needs, but it's available to you if you need it.

Importing CMS objects

To import CMS objects, log into the administration area of LemonStand and navigate to CMS / Import or Export / Import.

Click the "browse" button and select the appropriate .lca file that you want to import. Click the "import" button and wait for it to load. This could take a little time depending on how big the file is.

Warning: This operation will overwrite all existing objects which the file contains. So if you want to keep anything, you should make sure that the .lca file you are importing does not contain those objects. For example, if you have any pages you want to keep, and the .lca file has any pages, yours will be overwritten!

A word of caution

It is recommended that you keep your installation backed up. To prevent unrecoverable issues, you should always have an up to date backup available. LemonStand allows you to backup the entire system. We'll cover this in a later post. This feature is accessible by logging into the admin area and navigating to System / Backup or Restore.