Showcase: Further Ahead

0 | published by Danny Halarewich on Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Further Ahead focuses on web accessibility as part of their user experience work and web design/development work. Essentially that means they help people make sure that their web sites and applications are really easy to use for everyone, including people with disabilities.

They lead a lot of face to face training workshops and wanted to start offering those online as virtual seminars. They're now using LemonStand to sell registrations for those seminars from the Further Ahead Store.

This showcase interviews Derek Featherstone, COE (Chief of Everything) and Jeff Smith, Head of Getting it Done.

What is your overall impression of LemonStand?

“I don’t think we could be happier, actually. It showed a lot of promise when it was in Beta, and we were very happy to get ourself setup with a LemonStand store when it became production ready.

It has everything we need, and if we find something missing, we either build it or turn to the community to see what is already out there.”

- Derek Featherstone

Have you used other shopping carts before?
How do you feel LemonStand compares?

“Yes we have used others, both for our clients and for ourselves. This has been the best, by far.”

- Derek Featherstone

“We’ve used quite a number of eCommerce solutions and LemonStand has been the best hands down in many ways: flexibility, design, functionality, availability of payment gateways, templating, and ease of updating.”

- Jeff Smith

What are some of your favorite features of LemonStand, and why?

“I love the fact that there is enough power to do what we needed by default but still have the room to add our own functionality. Automating things like connecting our store to our email marketing software is just awesome.”

- Derek Featherstone

“The ability to build modules and the API are by far my favourite features as a developer. We’ve been able to add pretty much any features we can dream up via a module.

We also love the fact that we’re able to host our store on our own server. Many of the better/newer eCommerce solutions out there are hosted solutions and don’t have an option to host on your own server.”

- Jeff Smith

Did you find LemonStand to be flexible enough to meet your needs?

“Absolutely. We found a number of things that we wanted to add to our store so we started looking into the API and modules. The API makes virtually every part of the system and data available to be manipulated by modules.”

- Jeff Smith

Did using LemonStand improve your development process?

“The development process was definitely more enjoyable to to the flexibility of the front end templates. The well-maintained documentation was also a huge help during the development process.

We ran into a couple of roadblocks while developing some of our custom modules, but the extremely prompt responses from LemonStand staff in the forums made most of these non-issues.”

- Jeff Smith

Would you recommend LemonStand to others?

“Absolutely. It has been great to work with, and we’ve accomplished a lot fairly quickly including integration with third party services. This is a tool should easily be a part of any serious online store presence.”

- Derek Featherstone

“We would definitely recommend LemonStand to others. The price point and feature set make it accessible to almost any size of project.”

- Jeff Smith