LemonStand

» see lemonstand.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

LemonStand was a Vancouver company that spent a decade building store software for people who wanted to own the template. Version 1 was a PHP application you bought a license for and installed on your own hosting, with a free trial if you wanted to look first. That is an unfashionable product to be selling in 2009, when osCommerce was free and Shopify was already two years into persuading everyone that the hosting was the hard part.

The company went where the market went. BDC Venture Capital and a group of angels put in seed money in 2012, and a hosted version went public on 20 December 2013. Another $1.25 million came in from BDC and Silicon Valley angels in May 2016. The hosted LemonStand's distinguishing feature was that it took no transaction fees, which is a real position to hold against Shopify, and it kept the original audience's priority: you got at the templates and the markup instead of picking from a theme store.

At the end of February 2019, Mailchimp hired the team. It was not announced. TechCrunch worked it out a month later and published on 27 March under a headline that explains the whole thing: before breaking up with Shopify, Mailchimp quietly acqui-hired LemonStand. On 5 March LemonStand told its merchants the platform would shut down, and on 5 June 2019 it did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a date that is wrong ~

Wikipedia says LemonStand Version 1 launched on 28 July 2001. It did not, and the digits are transposed. lemonstand.com existed in 2001, but the Internet Archive's captures of it through 2011 show a small placeholder page reading "Welcome to the Lemonstand," nothing to do with e-commerce software. The product's own early host was lemonstandapp.com, and that domain is a clean bracket: it served a page titled "LemonStand - Coming Soon" on 21 May 2009, "LemonStand - Homepage" on 1 August 2009, and by 18 September 2009 the full title "LemonStand - Flexible PHP shopping cart | E-commerce software" with a tour and a demo in the navigation. The 28 July belongs to 2009.

~ the acqui-hire ~

Mailchimp and Shopify had an integration that mattered to a lot of small merchants, and in March 2019 it collapsed in public over data sharing, with each company blaming the other. In the weeks before that, Mailchimp had taken on the staff of a company whose entire product was a Shopify alternative, and then it switched that product off rather than operating it. Mailchimp went on to build its own commerce features.

For the merchants running on it, being bought and being closed arrived in the same email, and I say that as someone who was never in the market for the product. A paid PHP cart license in 2009 was a North American and Western European small-business purchase, and the Turkish small-merchant stack of that period ran elsewhere.

~ three months ~

From the 5 March notice to the 5 June shutdown was exactly three months, which by the standards of this archive is a decent notice period. Enough to export a catalog and rebuild on something else, not enough to do it calmly if the store was the business. Nobody published a count of how many merchants had to make that move.

lemonstand.com answers nothing now. The Wikipedia article's own citation for the shutdown is the dead homepage itself, accessed 7 December 2019, six months after the switch-off, when the notice was already gone.

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