7 Best LemonStand Alternatives (2021)
LemonStand was one of the most popular, flexible eCommerce solutions around but unfortunately, it shut down a while ago. If you were hoping to sign up but missed your chance, don’t worry! There are tons of great LemonStand alternatives out there to choose from instead.
In this article, we’ll take a look at 7 of the best LemonStand alternatives available in 2021. All of the eCommerce platforms on this list make it easy to build and manage a high-converting eCommerce site without any of the usual headaches.
And to help you decide which of these awesome eCommerce platforms is the right for your business, we’ve reviewed and compared each of them in-depth. Read on to find out everything you need to know.
Wait, what happened to LemonStand?
LemonStand closed down in June 2019. They refunded their annual customers, provided guidance for migrating sites to other platforms, and shut up shop.
This came as a great loss to the eCommerce world, as many people hailed LemonStand as one of the best and most cost-effective platforms available.
LemonStand announced the closure in May 2019 and didn’t provide any more details about the reason why the popular platform was shutting down. All we know is that LemonStand was bought out by email marketing titan Mailchimp. The company hoped to use LemonStand’s expertise to expand its services to integrate some eCommerce features into their platform.
Unfortunately, MailChimp doesn’t plan to release a platform like LemonStand going forward, but they ‘aqui-hired’ the LemonStand team to help them to improve the eCommerce features of MailChimp.
Thankfully, there are still many other e-commerce platforms to choose from if you’re looking for an easy way to set up a stylish e-commerce store for your business. With that in mind, let’s jump into our list of the 7 best LemonStand Alternatives.
What are the best alternatives to LemonStand?
- BigCommerce – Best value-for-money option (top pick)
- Magento – Flexible and scalable (ideal for fast-growing businesses).
- Shopify – Best full-featured, all-in-one eCommerce solution
- Sellfy – Best for subscription-based & print-on-demand businesses
- WooCommerce – Best Lemonstand alternative for WordPress sites
- Wix – Best site builder (most user friendly and intuitive)
- Squarespace – Best website templates (great for artists and creatives)
Top 7 LemonStand alternatives reviewed and compared
Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to know about each of our top 7 favorite LemonStand alternatives
1. BigCommerce
Just like LemonStand, Bigcommerce is an all-in-one open SaaS (software as a service) platform. This means that you don’t have to buy the software, you simply pay a monthly or annual fee to use it.
Bigcommerce has many of the same functions that LemonStand had including an easy-to-use drag and drop website builder, no limits on the number of products you can list and sell, and it’s good value too.
Like LemonStand, Bigcommerce is simple to navigate and suitable for beginner web designers, but it also offesr quite a lot of flexibility if you want to make changes to the HTML and CSS code for your site too.
👉 Read our full BigCommerce review
Pricing
You can acquire a standard Bigcommerce membership for as little as $29.50 a month.
If you want to unlock more advanced eCommerce tools like their automated abandoned cart saver emails and stored credit cards, you might want to upgrade to either their Plus ($79.95/month) or Pro ($299.95/month) plan.
Enterprise-level solutions are also available on a quote-by-quote basis
You can also enjoy a 15-day free trial of the platform before you pay anything, which is a huge bonus if you’re still unsure which platform is right for your business.
2. Magento
Next up, we have Magento, another great alternative to Lemonstand for fast-growing businesses. There are two different versions of Magento: Magento Open Source (free) and Magento Commerce (paid).
If you want a hands-off, full-featured ecommerce solution, we’d recommend Magento Commerce. It’s very flexible and scalable, which makes it the ideal choice for small businesses that plan on growing quickly and want a platform that can scale with them.
You can use their frontend drag-and-drop builder to create the design foundations for your site in minutes and then customize and extend the functionality as the need arises. There are tons of extensions available in the Magento marketplace.
Magento supports all the most popular payment gateways, like Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and more.
Pricing
There is no fixed price for Magento Commerce. Quotes are available on request and the platform is priced based on your company’s GMV and AOV.
3. Shopify
Shopify is a full-featured and well-established alternative to LemonStand. It’s one of the leading eCommerce platforms on the market and powers a huge number of online stores.
Shopify offers everything LemonStand offers and more, including easy store set-up, an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard, and options for selling both online and offline. It also comes with a bunch of useful integrated tools to help with your marketing efforts.
Shopify’s drag-and-drop website builder is one of the best around and makes it easy for beginners to get up and running quickly, while still leaving room for developers to build on the foundations with their own custom code or third-party extensions.
The easiest way to take payments through Shopify is through Shopify Payments – the platform’s own dedicated payment gateway.
However, if you’d prefer to use an external payment provider like PayPal or Stripe, you can do so – just be aware that you’ll be charged an additional transaction fee of between 0.5% to 2% depending on your plan.
👉 Read our full Shopify review
Pricing
Shopify is slightly pricier than LemonStand was but you can still get a store up and running with their Basic plan from as little as $29/month.
If you don’t need hosting and you just want to add buy buttons to your existing website, you can sign up for Shopify Lite for just $9/month.
You can also sign up for a free 14-day Shopify trial here.
4. Sellfy
Like Lemonstand, Sellfy is an easy-to-use eCommerce platform that allows merchants to quickly set up an online store and start selling their products from one place.
Unlike Lemonstand, Sellfy doesn’t aim to appeal to all types of digital retailers. It’s laser-targeted to creators that want to sell merchandise and digital products online.
It comes with a powerful range of features to facilitate simple eCommerce operations, including built-in print-on-demand features, support for digital product sales, in-depth analytics tools, multiple payment options, and more.
One feature that many users liked about LemonStand was its built-in support for recurring subscription payment methods. Sellfy has this too. It comes with everything you need to set up and launch a subscription business, including support for recurring payments with custom billing schedules, built-in email marketing to send content to your subscribers, and more
Pricing
The Sellfy Starter plan is available for as little as $19/month if you sign up for a yearly subscription. Higher-priced plans with more advanced features and priority support are also available.
👉 Don’t forget to use our Sellfy Coupon to get 20% off.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the best eCommerce solution for anyone who wants to build their website on WordPress. Unlike Lemonstand, it isn’t an all-in-one platform. It’s an open-source plugin that turns your existing WordPress website into a fully functional eCommerce store.
Because it’s open-source, it’s incredibly flexible with almost limitless customization options. You can use WooCommerce to build your store exactly how you want it with full control over every element.
Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most popular eCommerce solutions around and powers nearly a third of all eCommerce stores.
👉 Read our complete WooCommerce review.
Pricing
The WooCommerce plugin is available for free.
However, you’ll need to purchase hosting separately. There are lots of different hosting providers out there but we’d recommend Bluehost.
You can sign up for a Bluehost WordPress hosting plan that comes with one-click WordPress installation for as little as $3.95
6. Wix
Wix gets a bit of a bad rap in the eCommerce world. A lot of users see it as more of a personal website-building tool and avoid it when selling products online. However, it can still be a great option for eCommerce – it just depends on what you’re looking for.
The great thing about Wix is how user-friendly it is. It has probably the best, most intuitive website builder on the market. The templates are beautiful, and the interface is easy for beginners with no website design experience to use.
As such, it can save you a ton of time when it comes to designing the actual site compared to platforms like Shopify. And the more time you save on design choices, the more time you’ll have available to put into product development, marketing, and all the other important tasks involved in running your business.
If you just want to get your online store up and running quickly and don’t want to make it harder than it needs to be, Wix is a solid option.
On the other hand, if you’re running a larger business and need more flexibility or access to more sophisticated eCommerce features, Wix is probably not the way to go.
Pricing
Wix business and eCommerce plans start at $23 per month
7. Squarespace
Last but not least, let’s talk about Squarespace. Squarespace is another great website builder similar to LemonStand.
It’s more of a general website builder and isn’t specifically built for eCommerce stores, but all of the Business and Commerce plans include tons of awesome eCommerce features and functions that you can use to start selling your products and services online.
These features include abandoned cart auto-recovery, eCommerce website templates, shipping rate and tracking features, marketing tools, and more.
Like LemonStand, Squarespace is super simple and easy to use. It’s done away with all the bloat that small sellers don’t need and simplified the user interface. As a result, setting up a beautiful eCommerce store that coverts like crazy is a breeze.
The templates on Squarespace are the best in the industry. They’re all professionally designed so even beginners with no design experience will find it easy to create a storefront that their customers will love.
It’s the perfect choice for photographers, artists, and other creatives who don’t have huge sales volumes and just need a simple eCommerce solution.
Squarespace supports all your favorite payment providers including PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay.
Read our full Squarespace review
Pricing:
Squarespace pricing plans suitable for eCommerce start at $18 (Business)
However, the business plan comes with additional transaction fees of 3% on all sales processed through Squarespace. You can avoid these fees by opting for the Basic Commerce ($26) or Advanced Commerce ($40) plan instead.
Which LemonStand alternative should you choose?
As you can see, there are plenty of great alternatives to LemonStand out there to choose from. If you’re still not sure which one is right for you, here’s what we’d suggest:
- Small business owners who want the best all-in-one solution should go for either Shopify, Magxento, or BigCommerce
- If you want flexible and scalable, and you have some website design skills, go for WooCommerce & WordPress
- For complete beginners and small sellers with a limited number of monthly sales, we’d recommend Wix or Squarespace
- And if you’re selling digital goods, print-on-demand merch, or subscriptions, choose Sellfy
We hope this helped. Good luck!
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