LemonStand, the eCommerce platform aimed at mid-size merchants and developers creating custom and affordable online stores, raised seed funding from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) IT Venture Fund and a group of angel investors. The seed funding allows LemonStand to expand their team and community, while continuing to execute on their vision of a modular, easy-to-use, and higher performance eCommerce platform.

More than 50% of retail customers now purchase online

According to a Forrester research report, last year after topping $200 billion for the first time, online retail sales in the U.S. are forecast to reach $327 billion by 2016. In 2011,167 million consumers - 53% of the U.S. population - purchased something online.

"With consumers becoming increasingly comfortable purchasing online, more and more merchants are scrambling for an eCommerce platform that meets their needs of flexibility, quality support, community and at a price point they need to be successful," said Danny Halarewich, co-founder and CEO, LemonStand. "We've built a strong, loyal community of happy developers around our platform, and we're very excited to further strengthen the LemonStand ecosystem by investing more into development and partnerships."

Customer base and merchant transactions growing

Before LemonStand, the only options were between simplistic and limited platforms, or enterprise-level platforms that, while feature-rich, costs thousands of dollars and are complicated to set up and use.

Since LemonStand launched the first version of its eCommerce platform in 2010, it has seen incredible loyalty from their customer base, which has doubled in the last year, along with merchant transactions growing 250%.

"We've found clients who want an easy to maintain, customized experience for their eCommerce store are very happy with LemonStand. It's now our go-to solution for clients," said Adam McCombs, web developer and co-author of The Definitive Guide to Magento.

Created by web developers, for web developers

The seed investment comes from BDC IT Venture Fund and four angel investors: Michael Klinger, Paul Rochester, Kalle Radage and Michael Weider.

"We see a huge opportunity in the eCommerce space for LemonStand. The founders, with over 18 years of experience as web developers, have built a powerful, intuitive platform in a rapidly growing market where other options were lacking," said Andrew Lugsdin, Partner, BDC IT Venture Fund. "LemonStand will change the way future eCommerce stores are built - with a focus on building a strong ecosystem that brings rich features to merchants at a very affordable price."

Free Trial for Web Developers

A free trial for developers to evaluate LemonStand, develop themes or modules is available at https://lemonstand.com/buy/developer/. Commercial licenses start at $299.

About BDC Venture Fund

The BDC IT Venture Fund is a Canadian venture capital fund with partners in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Ottawa. We actively invest in early stage IT companies with passionate entrepreneurs who think big and will disrupt existing industries or create entirely new markets. Entrepreneurs come first and we use our broad network and operational backgrounds to help companies grow into global leaders. We lead the majority of our investments, which are typically early stage start-ups (late seed and series A) focused on Enterprise, Internet, or Mobile. The fund has invested in many successful companies including Radian6 (acquired by Salesforce), Beyond the Rack, Opalis (acquired by Microsoft), Bycast (acquired by NetApp), and Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM). For more information http://www.bdc.ca

About LemonStand

LemonStand offers a powerful and extremely flexible eCommerce platform for mid-sized merchants - at an affordable price. We believe that flexibility should be more than just a buzzword. It's in our DNA. Every nook and cranny of our software reflects this. Our platform, with our world-class customer support and developer community, helps businesses build and expand their eCommerce offering. To learn more about LemonStand, visit http://lemonstand.com and follow us on Twitter @LemonStand.