Lightspeed Retail Reviews

Pros

After two other point of sale systems; and after two years using Lightspeed, it is by far the best in all categories.
We had two previous POS systems that fell short in comparison to Lightspeed. Part of our success with Lightspeed is that after two previous point of sale systems; we knew what we really needed and the right questions to ask during the sales process. We submitted specific questions in writing. All of our questions we answered in detail in less than 24-Hours. The sales team knows their products and knew my industry. In fact, most of our distributors catalogs are already pre-loaded into their system.
The transition from our other popular POS was relatively easy, especially in comparison to our previous transition. The Lightspeed team was always there to help and even anticipated needs before I knew them. The inventory system and purchase order system work well.

Cons

The only limitation we have with Lightspeed in related to the fact that we sell a lot of items by weight. This does not create a significant problem for us; but having bulk items accounted for in inventory would be a nice to have. We would love an integrated scale capability. The Lightspeed team was more than willing to help us set up our system to sell bulk items; it works better than another other POS we looked at.

Pros

Integration across POS, eCommerce, Accounting, Data Analytics is excellent. We have been able to increase both sales and efficiency with this system. The accounting feature and its daily export to QuickBooks allows me to spend only a few minutes each day keeping books up to date. It certainly makes year-end a breeze. Lightspeed Analytics is an invaluable resource for forecasting and identifying areas of opportunity. Customer support is available 24/7 and if they aren't able to answer my question immediately, I have received a timely follow-up within a day or two.

Cons

There are some work-arounds that I have implemented. It would be nice to have the option for recurring billing and serial number tracking (not just adding a serial number to an item) as well as a better protocol for backordered items on Purchase Orders.

Alternatives Considered

Rain POS

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Easy choice. Transitioning from a local server based software to a cloud based system was the first priority. After seeing what else Lightspeed had to offer, I immediately made the change.

Switched From

AIM

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

When I was ready to purchase Rain, the sales team kept putting me off time and time again. If that was indicative of their customer service, I knew it wouldn't be the right fit for me.

Pros

I think it makes accepting online sales easy but that's about it for me.

Cons

I didn't realize how much I LOVED Lightspeed On-Site until we switched to Retail.
We were recommended to move to Lightspeed Retail because On-Site is old technology, however this program is way inferior for small businesses. Once we were contacted to move to Retail coincidentally our On-Site started having issues like our subscription wasn't renewed and our e-Com store was turned off randomly. Not really knowing what was going on... it made sense to change to the cloud based program they were really encouraging us to move to. Now that we have gone live I realize this program is not as complex regarding small businesses, and offers very little customizations for our personal style. I was told the Analytics feature for $1000 would give me the options I need to customize the program to our business such as implementing sales targets our staff could see and a customizable dashboard.... don't think it can. It really just gives you more reports than a one brick & mortar plus online store needs. It's not relevant. Also....we thought moving to retail with our physical and eCom store would run smoother and that gift cards would work between both platforms. Again... not the case. Gift cards are not available online nor can in store cards be used online without a lot of effort in making that happen. I think if you owned multiple stores that just reordered the same inventory and didn't care about labels or gift cards this would be the perfect system for you!

Pros

Customer Support is included and accessible
Intuitive
Useful for heavy amounts of inventory
Cloud Based
Accessible via multiple operating systems
Integrated with Cayan for seamless transition from my previous POS
Has extensions that enable enhanced reporting, loyalty and ecommerce integration
Updates are included

Cons

Frequently Buggy
UX issues at times
E-commerce integration is through third party
Advanced Reporting is an additional cost and is still poorly designed and buggy
Long waits for Customer Support
Widespread Outages do Occur

Alternatives Considered

Retail Pro and Shopify

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

We found limitations in integrations with e-commerce as well as difficulty with the licensing for Retail Pro. Not being cloud computing was very limiting, customer service being an additional fee was frustrating and that same customer service torpedoing our system and the backup was the death knell

Switched From

Retail Pro

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Most cloud POS seemed geared for start up or micro retail. Lightspeed had the best blend of power needed to handle a sizable company as well as the agility to be cloud based and utilize mobile platforms. The ability to have an integration with Shopify as well as the integrated customer support was the perfect nudge to migrate to Lightspeed

Pros

The sales tools are very easy to understand and enable us to train new employees quickly on the software. The software also makes managing multiple store locations easy and centralizes order and vendor information for our product managers to use across the company and analytics and insights that the software provides is essential to master the merchandising and inventory needs of our store.

Cons

While Lightspeed offers excellent analytics tools and integrations, most of them come at an additional cost which may be a deterrent for smaller businesses. If you aren't planning on investing a great deal of effort into the growth of your business (i.e. more locations or omnichannel sales) than you may be better served with another option. Also, while there are several integrations and API connections available for the system without designing custom solutions, some POS systems offer greater scalability and integrations with software like third-party e-commerce management tools. When moving away from Lightspeed's products for solutions such as this, costs can quickly add up.

Alternatives Considered

Revel Systems

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

We prefer that Lightspeed POS is a cloud-based system that can run on a desktop computer as opposed to Revel's iPad operating system. Also, Lightspeed offered greater flexibility in selecting merchant solutions like payment processors and credit card transaction equipment.

Pros

Sounded good when they pitched their product.

Cons

Not intuitiveToo many stupid reductant boxes need to be checked when adding inventory and epically laborNot honest about their company and focusAn absolute waste of time to try and get any tech support. Lightspeed auto increased our rate 300% do to credit card processing Extortion is how they opporate

Pros

Love its ease of use. Cloud based makes taking it on the road to do mobile events a breeze for payment processing and inventory management.

Cons

Could have used a little more help importing our inventory but after I figured it out it was easy to do.

Alternatives Considered

eTailPet and Retail Pro

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

It was expensive to maintain and use and not user friendly customer support was the worst.

Switched From

Retail Pro

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Ease of use. Products can be searched via product number, skew number, upc or item description.

Pros

The System was very use friendly and I am sad to say I will have to go with another company because the customer service was so poor.

Cons

Customer service is worse than anything we have experienced with more than 20 years in running a business.

Alternatives Considered

Epos Now and GoDaddy Website Builder

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Functionality and features. Retail and E-com in one package.

Pros

We have been using Lightspeed for our retail firearm business and this has been very helpful for us in monitoring our sales and inventory. This is great for small businesses like us and priced reasonably.

Cons

None that i can think of. Lightspeed has been great for our business.

Alternatives Considered

Square Point of Sale

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Better in inventory management, control and audit for Lightspeed

Switched From

Square Point of Sale

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Better in inventory management, control and audit for Lightspeed

Pros

Easy to use and set-up. Customer support is great. You are always talking to a real person and they always answer your questions or solve your problems.

Cons

There have been a few bugs every now and again. I would have liked some more one on one time when setting up our system.

Alternatives Considered

Lavu POS, TouchBistro and Oracle Primavera Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

The weren't pushy. They let us decide. There was always someone there to talk to. Webinars were great!

Pros

I can change the background? There isn't much to love about this system.

Cons

THe fact that they told me they specialize in using the Ipad, but everytime I call with an issue or question, customer service is surprised im using an ipad.
Also, customer charges and accounts are extremely confusing and difficult to use. You have to acces them through the "Manager mode" which is the least user friendly program I have ever encountered.
The worst part is customer service. When I need to speak to someone I am on hold for at least 15 minutes. Then to speak to a manager is 24-48 hours for a call back, if they even call back at all.

Pros

Lightspeed POS provided instant inventory, sales, customer and employee data that was missing from my retail business. It was relatively easy to set up and I had lots of support! The amount of information we now have about our retail business is staggering and it allowed us to connect multiple locations which made inventory transfer a breeze!

Cons

I had hoped for an integrated Loyalty program from the start (this has now been launched). We were manually keeping track of points for our customers which became tedious and inaccurate quickly. The new Loyalty is a good start but it feels a bit clumsy at times and not as customizable as I would like.

Sometimes inventory issues pop up when items are returned. For example, special orders from one location that are added to a purchase order for our main location, automatically show in stock at the needed location when simply checked in at main location. This can cause confusion as they are not physically at the needed location just yet. They have to be physically transferred but should not be added to inventory or received once they arrive (they were already there!). This took us a while to figure out and caused many inventory numbers to get out of whack.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Project and Quickbooks Online

Switched From

Microsoft Project and Quickbooks Online

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Lightspeed POS was cloud-based (which I'm a fan of), required minimal equipment cost layout at the beginning, they had monthly payment options, support was included, it had features to include inventory, purchasing, reporting, customer data (previous purchases), employee virtual time cards, integration with my e-commerce needs (real-time inventory), multi-location abilities, matrices for products that come in multiple sizes and colours.

Pros

Reporting is better than my previous POS and integration with Quickbooks. works most of the time.

Cons

Everything but reporting. This system is not user friendly, there is no consistency and it is difficult to get a workflow down because the pages are not similar. Searches are difficult ant there is much duplication in efforts! To enter a P/O and create items for e-com, you have to open as many as 5 browser tabs! All for something that Shopify can do in 1.

Alternatives Considered

Square Point of Sale

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Shopify had bad reporting and had to use a 3rd party app to connect to Quicbooks. Also didn't transfer COGS because their API doesn't allow that for 3rd party apps.

Switched From

Shopify POS

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

It looked like the best option, I liked the e-commerce integration, reporting, loyalty program and had other merchants recommend it. They have since changed their opinion also.

Pros

Customer service is available 24 hours. During the pandemic obviously the wait time for help took longer but most of the time it was efficient and easy to implement. I am a technological dinosaur and the learning curve was an uphill battle but customer service always came through for me.
So happy that the payment options finally were added.

Cons

It has taken me longer than I had expected to integrate my existing business with Lightspeed but that could be because of the pandemic and the wait time involved to get help. I am having difficulties getting my website finished so I can integrate with e-commerce.
I wish the billing and administrative department was open on weekends.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify POS

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

I didnt like dealing with all the apps in Shopify

Switched From

Shopify POS

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

I felt that Lightspeed was a complete package that looked professional and was relatively easy to use once the basic principles were in place. The move into e-commerce would be smooth.

Pros

Really like the cloud based flexibility. Also love the syncing ability with most of my main vendors for importing purchase orders.

Cons

Only con is the fear of web being down or my local internet service not working and if that is the case not being able to run my store. This is has never been and actual issue though.

Alternatives Considered

Quickbooks Point of Sale

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

We were growing and needed more stations in our store. The cost and clunkiness to do that with Quickbooks wasn't going to work. Lightspeed has made it really easy and seamless.

Switched From

Quickbooks Point of Sale

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Cost and the syncing capabilities with vendors in our industry.

Pros

Being able to track profit margins and sales. Knowing what products to keep around and which ones to remove from inventory.

Cons

There are 2 different sales screens and each has their pros and cons…. but this is probably the most confusing thing in the system.

Alternatives Considered

Square Point of Sale and Clover

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

The setup and Cloudbase of inventory. I can check sells, products, etc. from anywhere.

Pros

Lightspeed is easy and efficient to operate. From training new employees to hectic busy days, Lightspeed reduces human errors and allows our staff and business to achieve their fullest potential.

Cons

As a relatively small business, it would be nice to have different register modes for convenience without purchasing an add on register.

Pros

LS Retail is smart, accurate and quick. Inventory management is great, and reporting is comprehensive. This is everything we need to efficiently run our business. Being a cloud based system, we can track the business remotely.

Cons

LS Retail (coming from LS Onsite), can be a little clunky at first, however once you understand the work flow of the system, it all makes sense.

Alternatives Considered

RepairShopr

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

LS Retail is more powerful, and is cloud based, meaning no more backups required!

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

The Lightspeed Retail platform made more sense

Pros

- The retail POS side works fine
- e-Commerce side works fine

Cons

- Very complicated to customize any forms or reports for your business or not able to customize at all
- Lack of customer support
- Sales person overpromised on what system was capable of regarding our small business needs that were explained beforehand

Pros

In my application the thing I like best is the ability to import new items into my system directly from the distributor's catalog, as long as the catalogs are up to date. The master order is good for basic inventory items once you have reorder point set up. I need a web based system and this one is.

Cons

Sorry to say my list is very long for this one.
1. You can not return anything to a vendor....they say they are working on an update so this won't be an issue anymore, however this change has been recommended by users for a very long time and they are just now working on it.
2. If you go to sell something and the system does not see enough in stock, it will magically add enough to your inventory to complete the sale. This does wonders for the accounting side! I don't understand why they will not let you go into negative inventory, but it doesn't.
3. If you sell an item as an each, but buy it as a case, the reorder/master order will not work correctly. For example I buy a case of 200 treats and sell them as an each. If I set my reorder for 1 case when I have 0 cases, I will end up with 200 new in stock and up to 199 from the last case. If I set my reorder point to be 50 (each), and my stock falls to 45 I will now get 5 cases, instead of just 1. This is for anything you buy as a case and sell as an each.
4. Reports...There are a few reports that I need my employees to have access to, but there are many reports I do not want them to have access to. The problem with the software is, it is all or nothing for reports. I can not set it up so they can see the ones that need, without giving them access to ones they should not be seeing.
5. Printing price tags is the biggest headache for me. It is way too long to try to explain, just know if you want to print price tags before you finalize an order this is not the program for you!
6. If there system is down, you are dead in the water. Since April 17th till today July 17th I have experienced 6 outages that ranged from 5 minutes to an hour. Yes that is when customers walk out the door. I am paying for this service and they are costing me money.
7. Random dislikes... No spot for check numbers. Anytime the cash drawer is opened a receipt is printed, and every time a receipt is printed the cash drawer open...even for debit transactions, it will also print 2 copies of every credit card receipt, I have numerous customers that do not want the receipt, so I am just wasting paper. There is no auto fill for customer names or items. There is no warning of duplicate UPC's or Customer names. There is no customer loyalty program or rewards program in the system, I have to pay an outside company in order to give my customers a rewards program.

Pros

Looks nice if you spend the time to set it up

Cons

Lightspeed has been a horror for us since the start. What we were presented at during the sales meeting made us very excited and happy, but the second the contract was signed, for our 3 locations everything went down hill. I had to pull teeth and send multiple messages and to get our installation done on time. And even at that they finished doing it opening day, and were debugging while we had to serve clients. And that is a whole other story.

The product itself looks good but really does not work for a restaurant. Little things like having a single client pay without closing the full table is not possible. Servers need to figure out all these ways/trick to speed up service without being slowed down by Lightspeed. Items cannot be sent to multiple locations at ones (if something come from both the kitchen and bar like a Caeser with bacon)

The reports are terrible. Items are split up in ways were the they are split if clients have payed 1/2 or 1/3 of the amount. So items like Natchos that are group type items, to no how many have been sold you need to add the full one, the 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, .... amounts. So extracting any information takes a long time. Many of the reports have numerical errors in them, and as such they cannot be trusted. Also, tyring to export hourly sales or receipts all have wrong times on them (our restaurant closes at 1am, yet it still show receipts until 5am)

It is not possible to use the inventory option in bar because they can only have units, it

Pros

It's very convenient that it's cloud based, allowing me to access my POS from anywhere. The payment processing is very quick. For commission based employees, it's nice to be able to assign employee credit to different line items on a single sale. The inventory matrix tool is very convenient when it comes to editing wholesale and retail pricing. That's about where the positives end for me in regards to this POS system.

Cons

*Individual customers can only have a single sale/layaway/special order at a time. I hope you don't deal with commercial accounts that send their orders to you using separate POs. There's no way to separate different orders from a customer. It all gets put on the same sale/layaway/special order.
*If I send a purchase order to a vendor for 10 items, but that vendor is only able to ship me 5 of those items immediately, and will ship the other 5 once available, I have to delete the 5 backordered items off of that PO in order for the "finished" PO to match the invoice sent by the vendor for the 5 items that did ship immediately. Once the PO is "finished" in retail, I'm unable to edit it or add the backordered items back to it. *So I need to make a completely new PO with those backordered items and reference the original PO in the notes so I can trace it when those backordered items do finally ship.
*There's no easy way to view all customer layaways/special orders and the information/notes within each one.
*The "Company Name" field of a customer account doesn't show up on the customer lists.
*Trying to print labels is a really goofy process.
*I'm unable to change the "ship to" address on purchase orders if I need a product shipped to different locations, example: drop shipping directly to customer.
*There's no way to print a customer packing slip for deliveries or shipments.
*Discounts are applied to total quantity cost of line items, instead of each item individually.

Pros

The features we wanted and needed in or software and love about Lightspeed are:
100% Cloud based solution
True Omni Channel environment
Streamlined processes
Extremely well written software and Knowledge base
Ability to upload vendor price list, descriptions to Lightspeed All of our vendors information is at our finger tips, before we would have to hunt or go looking for this information now it’s just there.
Growing a retail business today can be done with lightspeed, since they have thought out whole process, and added a robust interface of features
A seamless connection to QuickBooks online.
We went out and reviewed, demoed almost 20 POS vendors some that were more specific to our industry and some that weren't and the boiled it down to 3 for all of our staff to review since they were going to be using the software daily and focused on the employee that has the most stress related to their respective job and targeted it first and secondly everyone else
We had to have 24/7 support
The most important feature we needed was it had to empower our team thru the business model we run and grow the team in all aspects of our business

Cons

It took a lot of time to get the information together from our 30+ year old company to go over to lightspeed platform from our old systems, and it was quite a chore for a small company. And not all of our information could come over in the initial installation lightspeed was somewhat limited, we could not bring our customers history and vendor history either. Reporting could be better and should be included with the base product, you will at some point "have to have the reports add-on" it is however an amazing extension on the base product. You have to have a good internet connection since you will be using a 100% Cloud based product, and you will have to have a backup internet connection, so you are always connected.
We went out and reviewed, demoed almost 20 POS vendors some that were more specific to our industry and some that weren't and the boiled it down to 3 for all of our staff to review. We focused on the employee that gets the most stress with their respective job and targeted it first and secondly everyone else and Lightspeed has done this.

Pros

I have no pros. I would like to take this opportunity to preface my review with the fact that I am not a negative review writer. As a business owner myself, I generally live by the golden rule of doing business and give the benefit of the doubt in most cases.
I took the time to write this today because I simply want to save you from the hardship of the lessons learned by so many business owners here.

Cons

If you are considering Lightspeed for your business, please STOP HERE and do research. Allow the hundreds of negative reviews that came before mine to be your bright waving red flag. I DEFINITELY wish someone had told me to read some of these before entering an agreement with this company. Also, my lawyer would have STRONGLY advised me against entering this agreement, but unfortunately it was too late for me.

Hopefully, it is NOT too late for you. I'll keep this short:

1.) Lightspeed is overpriced,
2.) Lightspeed's product is mediocre: glitchy and has limitations,
3.) Lightspeed contract terms are extremely binding, consider them unethical.
4.) Lightspeed will do nothing for you as a customer. Your concerns will be deferred from person to person all with their arms up in the air until you get tired of trying to find a reasonable resolution and you land here, at the end of your rope writing a negative review with hope that someone will learn from your mistake and stay away.

I'm pretty certain if the business owner died, Lightspeed will go after their loved ones for a payout.
This is not a company any business owner should do business with.

Pros

...Lightspeed Onsite is a great program, Lightspeed Retail is not a good program and still needs alot of work. In my opinion it is being sold without the kinks and issues being worked out of it. Even lightspeeds own technical support reps will admit the many issues wrong with the software and specifics that are different to lightspeed onsite.

Cons

-You are not able to take deposits on an invoice (without using a difficult round about method)

-My inventory pricing can change weekly, prices are not able to be adjusted, but only discounted, and discounts have to be created, its not something you can just type in.

-I sell Fish & Corals, thus I currently type them in as miscellaneous coral or miscellaneous fish on Lightspeed Onsite and then change this description to Yellow Tang, Clownfish, etc to reflect the name of the fish and then i just type in the price. Super easy on Lightspeed Onsite, on Retail impossible to do this. When you type in/scan Misc Fish, then change it to Yellow Tang (For example), as soon as you type in/scan misc fish again, it changes the first one to a quantity of 2, preventing you from typing in clownfish. How am i supposed to scan each fish? Even if I made barcodes for each and every fish, my pricing on livestock can fluctuate based on availability week to week, supplier country, and size, so I can just re-inventory 3000 fish every week. Not to mention we have over 3500 corals in store, and when we sell them they almost all have different prices, again I cant type these prices in.

-DISCOUNTING IS A DISASTER!, you have to first create a discount and then choose it from a drop down box. So a customer comes in and negotiates with myself of one of our employees, instead of paying $60 for a coral, we sell it to them at $53, its not possible

-Does not allow Negative Inventory

List goes on