LemonStand Blog

Protecting pages with LemonStand

0 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Monday, September 21, 2009

Protecting pages is a very simple task in LemonStand. For any page you can ask LemonStand to force HTTPS protocol for the page, or to allow only registered and logged in customers to access the page.

Forcing HTTPS protocol

Some pages of an online store must be accessible only through the HTTPS protocol. Examples of such pages are payment pages, customer account pages and checkout pages. LemonStand can force visitor's browser to switch to HTTPS protocol for any page. Of course, an SSL certificate must be installed on the server though. By default all pages could be accessed through both HTTP and HTTPS protocol. To force HTTPS protocol, just select HTTPS only item in the Allowed Protocol drop-down menu in the Page Editor.

Managing page access mode

In LemonStand you can configure a page access mode in such a way that only registered and logged in customers can access the page. This feature enables you to create protected pages, or secure zones, accessible only by customers. You may want to restrict guest access for pages like

• a list of customer orders
• order details page
• change password page

In the same way LemonStand allows you to restrict access to specific pages for logged in customers. You may want to use this feature for such pages as customer login page, password restore page and others.

To configure a page access mode, select a suitable item in the Access list in the Page Editor. If you choose Customers only or Guests only access mode, you also need to select a page to redirect visitor's browser to, in case if the visitor has no rights to access the page.

In the page list, LemonStand marks pages, accessible only for customers, with the lock icon:

The HTTPS enforcement and page access mode features allows you to create a well secured website with minimum effort.

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Products Anatomy - Part 1

2 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Wednesday, September 16, 2009

In this post I'm going to explain some of the product properties in LemonStand. We tried to cover all possible needs related to selling products using LemonStand. Some product properties, like product name and description, are intuitive and easy to understand. But there are 4 things which you might wonder about in the beginning:

• Options
• Extras
• Attributes
• Grouped products

Here is a Product page from the front-end demo site, demonstrating all four types of a product properties:

Product options

Product options are product characteristics which do not affect product's price or other product parameters. For example - colors of shoes or left handed and right handed golf clubs. You can manage product options on the Options tab. For each option you should specify the option name and a list of possible option values.

Customers can select product options before adding a product to the shopping cart and you will see selected options in the order details.

Extra options

Extra options enable you to create paid add-ons, for example, gift wrapping, or extra memory for a computer. You can manage product extras on the Extras tab of the product form.

For each extra you should specify its description and price.

Customers can select extra options using check boxes on the product page, before adding the product to the cart. In the product details you will see which extra options were selected.

Product attributes

Product attributes are just bits of text information about the product. Customers cannot select attributes on the product page - they can only read them.

Attributes are used to describe specific product characteristics. If your product is a inkjet printer, you can specify the model-specific details like print speed and resolution. You can mange product attributes on the Attributes tab of the product form.

Attributes allow you to keep product information well organized. You can save a set of product attributes as a template and reuse the template for other products. This saves a lot of time if you have 100 inkjet printers in the database. You won't need to create every single attribute for each printer. Instead, you just load a saved attribute set and enter attribute values, corresponding to that specific printer.

Grouped products

With the Grouped Products feature you can create a general product with choices for different prices and any other characteristics. Each grouped product is a separate product with its own SKU, but presented on the store web-site as a single product. For example, if you sell image prints, and each print is presented in two sizes with different price, you can use the grouped products feature. The print will be presented as a single product, and customers will be able to select specific size from a drop-down menu.

You can manage grouped products on the Grouped tab of the product form. Creating grouped products is fairly simple in LemonStand. You just click the Add grouped product link, and LemonStand creates a copy of the original product and displays it in a popup window. You only need to enter a grouped product's SKU, price and parameters which differ from the original product. You can change name, description or any other parameter of a grouped product.

On the front-end of the store, your customers select a specific grouped product from a drop-down list. LemonStand updates the product page each time when the customer selects another item in the drop-down menu. Thus, for each grouped product, the customer can see its price and other details.

The example images of the front-end product page are taken from our Demo Store. It is needless to say that with LemonStand you can create product pages that look completely different from the demo.

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Order routes explained

5 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Friday, September 11, 2009

Order routes are a unique feature of LemonStand. It allows LemonStand administrators to implement existing business processes of a company, or develop a new order processing approach.

What is an order route

Order routes are formed using order statuses, transitions between them and user roles. You can define any number of statuses, suitable for your store. After defining statues you define possible transitions between the statuses. For each transition you can choose whether LemonStand should send an email notification to a customer or to a LemonStand user, responsible for sending the order to a next status.

Each order status has a color code, which enables you to quickly recognize an order status in the order list.

The user roles feature enables you to split duties among the company staff. Each user in LemonStand belongs to some role, which you define on the System page. For each transition in the order route you can select a user role, responsible for the transition.

Example of an order route

We will illustrate the order route concept using an example of a small computer store. The company has an accounting and a delivery department. Customers pay for orders with credit cards. Before delivering an order, an accountant manually checks the transaction in the payment gateway interface, to avoid payment frauds. If the transaction is valid, the accountant marks the order as Paid and it can be delivered to the customer.

The order route for this case can have 4 statuses: New, Pending, Paid, Delivered. The statuses and transitions are displayed in the diagram below.

The order processing consists of five steps:

1. A customer creates an order, and it gets to the New status.
2. The customer pays the order using a credit card and LemonStand sends the order to the Pending status. This is accomplished by configuring the payment module correspondingly.
3. The accountant receives the email notification from LemonStand when the order gets into the Pending status. The email notification is configured in the New to Pending transition in the order route.
4. The accountant validates the payment transaction and sends the order to the Paid status. 
5. The courier gets an email notification from LemonStand, and carries the order to the customer. After that he sends the order to the Delivered status.

Order routes can be adapted for any company of any size. You can define dozens of statuses, transitions and user roles, and configure email notifications, making the order processing smooth and simple.

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Announcement: Pricing and value

11 Comment(s) | published by Halarewich D. on Thursday, September 10, 2009

As we draw closer to releasing the beta and ultimately version 1.0 of LemonStand, we are determining more things in regards to our pricing, licensing technology, distribution, customer management, tech support and the LemonStand Marketplace.

Aleksey Bobkov and myself, Danny Halarewich the co-founders of LemonStand have been planning the details of these things for quite some time now. And we are ready to make a few announcements, even if certain things are not written in stone (it's more like sand at the moment).

Pricing

There is a huge range of prices for eCommerce products. From free (open source with no support), to thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars per license (so called "enterprise" level). When determining a price, we had to consider the value we are providing, uniqueness and who our target market is. It's no secret that our main customers will be web designers, developers and agencies. We believe that our solution is unique and addresses a major problem that noone else has done effectively. While considering those things we came to a few conclusions.

Our main customers are repeat ones

Web professionals and agencies usually complete more than 1 project each month. And with the continued growth of eCommerce, many of those projects are perfect candidates for leveraging LemonStand. With that in mind we will be offering tiered pricing for our customers. The more you use LemonStand, the more benefits you'll get, including lower pricing.

Value added services

Web professionals need ways to promote themselves and win projects. We'll be offering partner programs to help you do this. Certain opportunities will be available simply by becoming our customer, and others will be available for people enrolled in higher-level partnerships with us. These opportunities will result in you ultimately getting more projects. There will also be access to "insider information" accessible only to customers and/or partners that will provide early announcements and tips on using LemonStand. We have many things in the oven right now, and will make specific announcements closer to launch.

Support

We had planned to provide email support for customers for 1-year right from the start. This is a major differentiator between a commercial product and open-source. We also plan to offer high-levels of support (probably after launch though) for customers that need it. The details are being worked out, but this might mean telephone support or faster email response times.

What's the verdict?

After considering all of the value we're offering, and the cost of providing proper support, we have come up with a price that we feel will work for us and you. That is around $300 USD, per-license. Each license is good for 1 website. You may also use this license for a development environment.

Some extra things to consider

We anticipate that we'll provide an initial discount for our beta testers. We may also open up for pre-orders prior to release as well, which would earn you a discount. And don't forget that LemonStand will use tiered pricing, so the more sites you build with it, the bigger your discount.

This price leaves much room for profits if you are creating websites for any sort of profit, whether you are building them for customers or selling products yourself.

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