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

Originally, ease of use. Now is not the case.

Cons

We have had Shopkeep/Lightspeed for 9 years. It does not make doing inventory easy at all. We have nothing bur problems with the chip reader/swiper, continuously disconnects. Cannot make sales. Have spent many calls to fix, they make us buy new card readers every time. Also multiple problems with scanners not working! Problem has not been resolved in 9 years! Our other stores using another POS does not have these problems. Looking to switch.

Pros

Ease of implementation Multi location abilityPortabilityLinks to e-commerce optionAbility to use multiple terminals to access data and input sales/work orders/purchase orders etc over cloud

Cons

Lacking in some reporting function, is available at added costNew fee structure for users not interested in Lightspeed payments

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

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

The system allows vision into your business clearly and quite simply. From the day to day sales to the back office reports, the system is easy to use. In ALL cases where something is not exactly as you envision it, the customer support team is there to help; they are PHENOMENAL and coming from retail, I do use those words quite carefully. We launched our business with Light Speed Onsite and have since upgraded to Retail. Each and every step of the way, the support team has helped with and gone and above and beyond getting me operating thru, from the simplest to the complex. We have no other point of reference of other POS providers, but many times other they are present at tradeshows. From a personal perspective, hearing the sales pitch (what we assume is the best of the best), LightSpeed provides services and abilities well above the others.

Cons

Unfortunately, price does come in to play. The cost, now knowing the system, is well worth it. However, there are other features that we feel should be included (as commonly seen elsewhere) that must be a "add-on" application from outside providers. Interpretation: add on = added costs. Being a small business, the cost of the POS system is significant enough, add on's are almost impossible to also incur.

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Services provided. Easiness of use. Clean appearance.

Pros

*Ability to build system at any location
*Ease of use
*Well produced self help videos
*Ability to delete mistakes
*Helpful technical support team
*Integration with Cloudbeds

Cons

The end of day closing process is not as clear as it could be

Alternatives Considered

Revel Systems

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

The switch was not within this company, but in my recommendation to use Lightspeed over Revel. Overall easier to build and train others to allow turnkey management of the system once built. I consult with businesses here to build their POS systems and recommend LS every time

Switched From

Revel Systems

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

as above

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

The only two positive things I can say is Lightspeed payments work seamlessly and Dylan, our trainer was great.

Cons

Cons:1. The register pops open on every transaction-including charges2. Try and find a sales transaction from a couple of months ago. Lightspeed only shows a limited amount for each day.3. There are limited amount of reports available.4. Only uses Dymo printers which are cheap, always jam and the product tags are extremely expensive. If you tag your mechandise, get ready to spend alot!5. Jumped into training mode without a warning and no way to prevent soneone from going into training mode.6. Lacks a variety of controls that you can give a user. 7. Products can only be priced by markup not margins.8.Good luck tracking returns.9. Payment reports are confusing.10. When you call support, be prepared to know more than they do!

Alternatives Considered

Rain POS, KORONA POS and Shopify

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

We wanted a better product

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

We liked some of the features with Lightspeed. We thought we were signing up for lightspeed the R version but got talked into the X version. The X version is so juvenile compared to Quickbooks POS.

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

- ecom and retail link seamlessly
-open and close cashes easy for staff
-each staff has own login to track sales progress and customers
- can limit staffs access to certain tabs that are irrelevant
-painlessly easy to submit orders, and create new product
-can easily provide quotes for potential customers
-easy to do inventory checks from your cell phone, great for purchasing at trade shows or counting stock in warehouse.

Cons

Cons: -Limited integrated payments
-Limited ways to get content linked to other selling platforms
-Blog
-doesn't do penny rounding for cash sales (canada doesn't use pennies)
- creating a work order- we cannot add or remove tabs that show on work orders
-system crashes during work hours, (bugs in system) approx every 3 months, which means we have to use manual receipts and cash only.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify POS

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

We were looking at a way of integrating our online inventory to our retail, so our inventory can be managed.

Switched From

Shopify POS

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

lightspeed was easier to operate and was primarily pos based, shopify was primarily online based

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

- Excellent Purchase Order Workflow
- Easy tool to do inventory counts quickly
- (Beta) Import Tool makes it easy to bulk load new items, or update existing ones
- Supports custom fields to add additional information to items (Release Dates, for example)
- Phone and online support is fantastic

Cons

- May seem pricey if you aren't leveraging all the features
- Limited barcode scanner compatibly
- Custom fields are not currently searchable

Pros

We have used Lightspeed Retail for over 2 years now for our seasonal retail business as well as a small wholesale operations that includes manufacturing/production. While small scale compared with many POS users, we have unique and demanding needs and have struggled to find a good software interface. Lightspeed has been a solid performer and worked well for us.

We have a wide range of part time employees with various levels of tech savvy and expertise. Lightspeed is intuitive and user-friendly in basic procedure – checkout, returns, applying discounts, holding or suspending sales and adding customers. Lightspeed was on time with EMV-certified terminal support by the October 2015 deadline and has worked well with Cayan.

Adding products is straightforward. We only use the most basic features of purchase orders and inventory management – we do not rely on Lightspeed to generate orders based on stock but those look like useful features for larger operations.

Reporting is comprehensive and makes it easy to track sales and trends and reports are easily exported to Excel.

Customer service has been prompt and when there are long wait times, you have the option to leave your number and receive a return call. Follow through on issues has been good and while there have been challenges, problems are resolved in a timely manner.

For the products we produce, the “build” function works well to create the pieces from parts in inventory.

Cons

The main unresolved issue I have had with Lightspeed is that it rounds the cost of items to two decimal places. We deal in 100s of pieces that are fractions of a cent and therefore simply cannot track costs. All of these items show as have no cost which is extremely problematic and exponentially so when a piece is created from several “no cost” items. I was told almost two years ago that a fix had been requested by many customers and indeed it was listed several times in the “Lightspeed Ideas” but to my knowledge nothing has been done. If this could be fixed, Lightspeed would be an almost perfect POS solution for us!

Also it is spendy. But I guess you get what you pay for.

Pros

The integration with xero accounting has been a true time saver for my business. It transfers all sales data at the end of the day seamlessly so I don't have to. The ability to use the front end off site has been super helpful as well as it doesn't tie me down to the store and I can do a lot of my work on the go. Creating products, invoicing clients, setting up the main screen custom to what I want is extremely simple once you run through it once.

Cons

Theres a few simple features that are missing from the PoS software which I would like to see integrated and would make it hands down the best in the industry for small businesses.
1) Getting an integrated payment terminal that accepts chip, pay pass and swipe options would avoid any mistakes between manually punching in the amounts on the debit/credit machine and would avoid any back end work after the day closes to be able to balance the day
2) Allowing me to enter the details of the invoices (supplier name, invoice number, total amount being paid, gst, pst, etc.) that are being paid out on a daily basis and having that information transferred to xero would alleviate tons of paper work after the close of the day.
3) There is no way to pull out a month end statement for corporate clients that pay their account once a month. Checks have to be cross referenced manually with the bills that have been put on tab. You should be able to at the very least select which tab invoices are being paid from the list of invoices on the clients account. This would show which ones are outstanding at a glance rather than having to refer back to the paper invoices that the system creates.
4) A front facing screen to display pricing of items being charged, advertisements, and other information is something I have been asking for since day 1 (3 years now). And I would love to see this feature incorporated.
5) Having the ability to offer a discount for a bulk purchase is something that should be automatic.

Pros

It's a relatively easy system to navigate. Permission settings are acceptable. Reporting is decent but all very basic unless you purchase Analytics. We use the software for multiple locations but keep separate inventories at each location. We can easily see inventory at other locations, transfer inventory from store to store effortlessly. Creating inventory items is easy as well as setting up pricing rules. Able to customize receipts, labels, and transfer paperwork with some HTML knowledge. Sales are smooth as well. Split payments are pretty easy and relatively intuitive.

Cons

No really good way to do rentals. We are a tennis shop and rent/demo racquets. We had to come up with our own solution.

B2C eCom is great - and can use the existing inventory; we have it set up as a separate location so we can see all inventory across eCom and retail - until you want to add B2B. It's difficult and expensive to add B2B and have it work the same as eCom. We learned, much later, that we need to have a separate website, a separate database of inventory and we would not have visibility into this inventory from our retail or eCom side. Huge disappointment. The eCom module is not native to LS. They purchased the product and have integrated it into LS - so their APIs won't even allow you to have that visibility.

Support is good for the most part. Simple things, but, holy smokes the printing!!! First, you have to use Firefox to get the printing to work at all. But Firefox constantly loses the printer default settings. So swithching printers throughout the day between labels, transfers, receipts...causes Firefox to throw up allover the printer settings. This happens daily, sometimes several times during the day. It's ridiculous. Support doesn't give a good answer - they tell us to follow the documentation. But that doesn't fix anything. Many times during the day we have to go back into the Firefox configuration and reset the default printer. Painful.

Pros

Onboarding and setup was a breeze - After signing on, we were tasked with a tutorial and onboarding process which, at times, was drawn out, but VERY helpful. It was a great learning tool and incredibly useful. They offered additional resources, but given my stubborn nature I set out on my own. The onboarding process was fairly easy. Painstaking, but simple. There were a few tasks that more difficult than necessary though. Like building the floor plan. I am very meticulous and there were not many options for the design, but I was able to figure it out with assistance from the help desk.

Very customizable layout and very versatile - The overall operation of the system is very easy, but not basic. Ease of use is key to me, especially when training new employees or adding/changing features. Need a new menu item on a certain screen? 30 seconds. Need to reorganize the layout? Just drag and drop. Color code menu items? Sure why not. We change our menu daily/weekly, so this was an important feature to me and my FOH manager. GThe back end and reporting is excellent as well. I was able to show the owner how to access the dashboard and view sales and sales vs goals. I can see how many of (X) item I sold when I ran it as a special, or how much of a certain item I sell week to week. We use it as our time clock, and even my BOH with ZERO knowledge of the system figured it out in seconds.

Cons

The only major complaint I have is that there aren't enough credit card processors integrated in to the system, which is crucial to me.

Pros

I barely used this product. What sold me on it initially were the demos in being able to have a simple interface for my employees on both the retail and restaurant side and a much more detailed backend than square that supposedly integrates nicely with Quickbooks.

Cons

I was very specific about my operating needs. I am also very busy with small children and multiple businesses. The onboarding was described as very simple, and it was not. I needed three systems, and was told that was what I was paying for. They shot me an invoice which I did not read thoroughly enough. They put in fine print on the invoice that the invoice and payment is acceptance or their sales terms which you have to then go to their website to read. Once I asked for the hardware items that they did not send me, they also charged me for a bunch of extra software that were not part of the original sales discussion or even the second sales discussion. They never refunded me for two years of unused software when I decided that I was not interested in doing business with such a shady company. No class.

Pros

The system ties together items, sales, customers, and sales staff seamlessly. This allows us to dig in and review product performances like never before. Using the matrix feature makes creating items with multiple sizes, colors, and fits easy.

Cons

The system crashes. These past few months have been especially stressful with our busy season approaching. The following list is made up of days in which we were not able to take payment from customers anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
Monday March 16, 2020
Wednesday Feb 26, 2020
Saturday Feb 15, 2020
Saturday Feb 1, 2020
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Saturday Dec 14, 2020
Friday Dec 13, 2020
Friday Dec 6, 2020
Sunday Nov 3, 2019
Monday Sep 30, 2019
Thursday July 18, 2019
Saturday July 13, 2019

We've had an email in, with several followups, to our Lightspeed rep for the reassurance these outages will slow/stop. Unfortunately every email has gone unanswered for over a month now. This lack of communication is very frustrating. We're just waiting for an outage on a weekend during our busy season. Being we are locked into a contract we have no way out but are actively searching for an alternative as to not live in the fear of an outage at any moment.

Lightspeed Payments is another spot to touch on. All told, the switch to Lightspeed Payments would cost our company roughly an extra $7,000/year on top of our current processing costs with Vantiv.

Pros

The ease of use for my staff is great. We also love the ability to add purchase orders and receive them with ease. Our old system did not have this. I also like that it has great inventory management. We just did a recent inventory count and that went so much easier than in years past. Also, the reporting is overall very good. It gives you a good insight into your data.

Cons

The Ecom side could use a lot of work. I would love to see a better way to do discounts and markdowns. The way it is set up now is very complicated and makes it a lot harder for us retailers to use. For the retail side, I would love to see a green light button on both the email receipt and email purchase order side. Sometimes I click send email but I can't remember if I actually hit send. A Green/red light would be helpful. Lastly, I would love to see a feature that incorporates a discount on items when receiving a purchase order. Currently, there is a box to input the % discount of $ off but it does not get incorporated into the product cost.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify POS, Vend and Heartland Retail

Switched From

Shopify POS, Vend and Heartland Retail