Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Lemonade.Com: Great Idea, Horrible Execution

As a web master I'm often looking for ways to make money off of my site. I read on Mashable.com about a site called Lemonade.com. The site offers a very simple-to-use interface for creating very simple to use flash-based "Lemonade Stands" that display products you choose to feature. Then, as people buy them, you get a cut. Of course, Lemonade.com also gets a cut or else their service wouldn't be free. Now, this all sounded great. I signed up, created my Lemonade Stand and pasted the code into my sidebar with incredible ease.

Today, I went back to Lemonade.com to add some more products only to discover a few frustrating things:

1) The graphics kind of suck. The product's pictures that show up in the flash interface look like they're 32x32 pixel Windows icons or something. Some of the DVD covers I had listed were almost unreadable. Why would anyone buy a movie with crappy graphics on the cover?

2) The "DVDs" I added to my Stand aren't actually DVDs. Even though, in the setup menu at Lemonade.com, they list the movies you can choose from under "DVD" when you click on the movies you find yourself at Movielink.com--a legal movie downloading site. To add insult to injury this site doesn't work on Macs--guess which platform I'm on.

3) At least one of the "DVDs" I had listed isn't even available at Movielink.com anymore. How many more unavailable movies might I find, I wonder?

4) When I did a search for iPods, I found many of them available but all of them over-priced and old. I wasn't really expecting pre-orders for iPod Touches, but they are selling the 60GB 5g iPod for $400! You can get an $80GB 5.5GB iPod for $350!! Why would anyone buy an iPod from my store for that price? They also had available iPod Minis (a product that was discontinued quite a while ago--the Nano replaced it) and I even found a first generation iPod Shuffle (the thumb drive style) for $60. To be fair, that's about what they're going for on eBay.

5) Their book section is insanely limited. I was hoping to sell A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, but I couldn't come close. They only offer three genres of books. "Arts & Photography," "Cooking, Food & Wine" and "Health, Mind & Body." Wow, I think that's the way they divided up the Library of Congress, too.

6) Their flash interface is a little buggie actually. It's one of those annoying drag-n-drop things that works most of the time but fails just when you've got the order of your products all messed up. HumbleVoice.com is another site that falls in the trap of flash's shortcomings. In theory flash is great, in practice it sometimes totally screws you up. My kingdom for text fields and check boxes to determine layout and/or order.

In the end, I really think they've got a great idea. However, their execution just sucks. They pay you through Paypal which is wonderfully convenient, but since they have such a limited product range, their links are unreliable and their graphics suck, they've managed to seriously hobble their own product. I'm not sure why anyone would want to go with them.

Orignal From: Lemonade.Com: Great Idea, Horrible Execution

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