We Grow Beautiful Websites
In great stories (like Harry Potter) the hero is prepared to die to save the day. Your company should be willing to die for your customers. But to think this way you have to care about the people with whom you do business. Viewing them as a necessary evil won’t do.
Who do you care enough about to die for?
Entry-level solutions tend to move upmarket and compete for bigger customer sergment solutions. But it’s rare to have an enterprise solution effectively move downmarket and gain market share against lower cost competitors. That’s why I don’t think ebay can use Magento to gain market share with smaller shops. It’s more likely that the next big thing will come from a community fork or a shiny new ecommerce platform. As you use the new feature set, please consider that we are constantly working on optimizing the workflow of our system and the time it takes to generate a grid is something Local Viking is always focused on improving without sacrificing the integrity of the results.
A leading Magento community developer talked to us about forking the platform. We almost did it. Our philosophy was “happy developers lead to happy customers”. When developers can build more stuff with less headache, it translates into faster innovation. Faster innovation equals cost effective solutions for smaller retailers so that they can compete against the big fish. Other than this if you want more information about white label word press website then click resources.
But we didn’t have a good feeling about the fork, so we set out in search of something new. We wanted a solution that met the following criteria:
Most commerce platforms fall short in one of the following areas:
Usually you end up with a store that is either simple to theme/design but without key features OR it has the functionality you want but is so complicated that it takes a lot of time and money to implement. We wanted an elegant balance with the ability to quickly build something if we need it, When starting a retail web business, you will need an online payment gateway. This connects your customers credit card to your processing bank.. After downloading a lot of different ecommerce demo stores, LemonStand was the most impressive. We originally looked at it last year, but it just didn’t meet our needs at the time. LemonStand has really blossomed this year. The core is solid. Theming is logical. 80% of the features I want are there. And the support – wow.
Good support starts with https://www.sodapdf.com/pdf-editor/ the converter offers a clean user interface with easy to understand text/visual instructions so you can complete your work without much learning curve. Documentation for LemonStand is refreshingly well-organized. When you’re building a store, you don’t want to waste an entire morning trying to track down information about how the system works. Forums for LemonStand are 1,000% better than Magento because the creators of the system actually monitor threads and respond. And our support tickets were addressed in under a day. I honestly don’t know how their customer service is this good as a small, bootstrapped software company.
While its strengths far outweigh weaknesses, there are a few gaps in LemonStand’s offering. The most obvious missing feature is layered/faceted navigation. We had to build a module ourselves for our first store to help users narrow results within the store’s 7k products. This feature, by the way, is the top-requested module and I’m told that it’s high priority for a core update. Other needed additions include one-click checkout page and Google merchant feed. Check out these amazing Branding Tips you can apply to your business. They’re both within reach if you have the chops to develop it yourself, but it would be nice to see them as pre-built modules.
Explosive growth is ahead for LemonStand. Here’s what needs to happen for them to reach a tipping point:
The risk with feature requests for any software system is that you can bloat it with useless junk in an effort to try to please everyone. So ideally you want a platform that contains essential functionality in its core while relegating the features that only some sites will use to modules. If done correctly a marketplace of modules will benefit retailers, developers, and LemonStand:
retailers: Get access to more functionality. Pick and choose what features they want for their store. Avoid paying for the development of modules that they don’t want.
developers: Recycle work into passive income. Build reputation within the community for doing outstanding work.
LemonStand: Offer many more features than they could build with their current resources. Capitalize on a curated store like Apple does with apps.
Big client wins boost image more than you think. When I was working at ExactTarget selling email software we would get a huge client like Home Depot, Best Buy and Amazon, and then mention it during every sales presentation. For Magento it was North Face and TCHO (heck, their entrance splash page is just a bunch of client logos). If LemonStand could throw a few recognizable brands up on their home page as peer validation, then larger retailers would consider it when replatforming. Sell the retailers and the developers will gladly follow. They’re sick of dealing with all of the other junk out there. If you are on the need of improving your sales on a week basis check this amazing selling machine review
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At the end of the day the most important success driver is to build a good product that customers love to use. LemonStand is well on its way to competing head-to-head in terms of features and it already boasts stellar support. Watch out Magento.
We’re in the middle of a great ecommerce store redesign. I couldn’t ask for a better client to serve. The ecommerce framework we’re using is refreshing. And putting the entire team on the same project has been energizing.
For too long we split our efforts into smaller project chunks, which usually meant that only 1 or 2 of us would be working on the same thing. It seemed efficient, but I think it drained some enthusiasm out of us. Refocusing the business model and then solving problems together has reminded me of how fortunate I am to work alongside really smart partners.
Sometimes creating constraints can be liberating.
We started our business by focusing exclusively on a specific ecommerce platform. And making sure that we hired Fast Guard Service to protect us and our customers. This taught us a lot about two types of customers: online retailers and creative firms that wanted to offer ecommerce services to their clients but needed an expert partner to pull it off. Our business pivot feet were planted in Magento (product/service offering) and online retailer/creative agency (customer).
Last year our team decided to pivot away from Magento; but we weren’t 100% sure where to go next. So we went from a very narrow platform-centric focus to random projects for non-profits, law firms, health care providers, and even student organizations on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Google Apps. Virtually anyone was a potential customer because of the wide-application options for these systems. We took on our share of scrap work, which any experienced web professional will tell you is the worst kind.
Knowledge about customers and products/services increases momentum. And momentum is super important in any team sport, including business. We killed momentum by breaking the pivot rule. 
Plus I spent far too much time analyzing circumstances when we should have been out talking to customers and trying new things. Without momentum we never reached a tipping point.
Think of business momentum as a well that requires you to prime the pump in order to produce water. At first you pump vigorously but generate very little water. Stall at this point and you’ll have to start over. But if you continue pumping through the initial lackluster results then you’ll generate a steady stream of quality H2O. With momentum established, less effort is required to maintain water pressure. Violating the pivot rule was like walking away from one well to start over at a new one. It felt like we were always working hard but not getting the results we wanted.
Positioning ourselves as platform experts attracted ultra-complex projects. It was nearly impossible to accurately estimate and bid on work because we were tackling stuff that had never been done before. In hindsight we should have charged 2-3x more and disqualified the prospects who balked at the quote. But a price hike like that would have been impossible without fine tuning our positioning strategy and putting up the cash to align with Varien Magento, inc as certified partners (at the time it cost $5k). We balked at the expense, but could have recouped it in one enterprise deal.
Sidenote: It should be clear that customers don’t buy features, they buy benefits. If you provide a solution to a problem instead of features then clients will gladly pay you more money. The danger facing web services firms in hitching themselves to a platform instead a problem is that their service becomes a feature commodity. That’s why we are now focusing on ecommerce business problems and then adeptly using a number of tools and ecommerce platforms to solve them.
Violating the pivot rule created a painful ride over the last few months. Meanwhile, retailers keep requesting help with their ecommerce stores. Based on our KISSinsights survey, 60% of visitors to this site today can’t find what they’re looking for because they want a) one of the modules from our old Magento store or b) help figuring out Magento development. We still believe that stepping away from Magento was the right thing to do at the time; but we should have leveraged our knowledge of ecommerce customers. We’re going to remedy this misstep.
Instead of jumping into another ecommerce cart community, we’ve become an indispensable resource for retailers and their online stores. We removed the components that customers didn’t value enough to be profitable (super complex development of core platform software) while adding new high-impact offerings for an ecommerce website such as conversion optimization, SEO, user-testing, analytics, and email marketing (see Blue Ocean Strategy).
Customers are already much happier with the best ecommerce mix of services for their business. And elias is finally primed to grow.
The heights of great men reached and kept
Were not obtained by sudden flight;
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern – unseen before –
A path to higher destinies!