Lemonade.com lets people create a widget that contains different products for sale from companies like Appleand EBGames and easily place this "lemonade stand" on social networking sites and blogs. People then earn referral fees when people buy products via their stand.
The underlying technical challenges to this site are huge. Millions of products have to be normalized from different feeds from companies including LinkShare, Commission Junction and Perfomics. Searching products and configuring stands needed to be simple yet powerful. Custom interfaces for partners like Facebook needed to complement tools for performing the same tasks on lemonade.com. Most of all, the lemonade stand itself needed to work consistently across third-party sites and allow for easy browsing while accurately tracking clicks, impressions, and other necessary reporting data.
After a accelerated three month development schedule, Lemonade has had a fantastic start — launched in early September, it has garnered national attention. It was recently featured in the New York Times and was just named one of 5 websites that will change your life on the Today Show.
"Working with the entrepreneurs at Lemonade.com has been a wonderful experience," says Franz Maruna, CEO of Concrete Websites. "The vision these guys have for monetizing the energy that's already being invested in social networking and online publishing is refreshing. They're on the leading edge of web 2.0."