Lightspeed Retail

Avantages

Acces every wherre and the multi-chanel fonction!

Inconvénients

Its realy hard to custom for specifict fonction.

Avantages

I didn't get to use this product at all so I don't have any pros.

Inconvénients

The agents have no idea what they're talking about. I asked my agent multiple times if this system would work for the loyalty program we have implemented in store and I was told yes every time. So I bought into the system, spend hundreds. They refused to refund me even though it was their fault I bought into a system that would not work for me. Then they told me not to worry about sending back the terminal, because it was a free part of their promotion and now they're trying to tell me I have to pay in full for the terminal. AVOID!

Avantages

nothing at all, i do not like this software

Inconvénients

Loyalty program, discounts are hard long and aggravating to set up, customer service takes a long time to respond,

Avantages

The features is most everything you need. The support is the problem.

Inconvénients

The support is horrible. They think they know and understand issues better then the customers. They don’t listen and will treat you like you don’t even matter.

Alternatives envisagées 

Shopify

Pourquoi choisir Lightspeed Retail 

Wanted a coudbased option to help manage remotely.

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

Looked like the total package. I was wrong. They lacked the customer support touch. I don’t know how this company will continue to grow.

Avantages

Creating items and managing retail is very easy through Lightspeed Retail. The reporting features allow you to make great decisions for your business based on accurate data. Anytime I need help with something or am unsure as to how to do something regarding any feature of Lightspeed Retail, support is only a click away through the helpful chat feature. They are almost always immediate to respond and always kind and patient with any question.

Inconvénients

Understanding how retail communicates with eCom is a little intimidating at first and simply took a minute to wrap my head around how it links together. Discounting could be a little more straight forward too but overall ok.

Avantages

Simple to use and it covers all the basics.

Inconvénients

What we don't like about Lightspeed Retail are the reporting features (or lack thereof), and it's inability to project inventory. We've had Lightspeed Retail for over 8 years now, and the reporting features have changed over the years, with one of the best reports being eliminated. Much of the reporting now is sold to you as an add on, and in our case not worth the extra money.

Avantages

I liked the sales pitch. He promised a ton of stuff that I wanted to hear. Unfortunately none of that stuff ever panned out. Just like a politician.

Inconvénients

Here is a list of my complaints about Lightspeed Omnichannel (eCom + Retail PoS)

- No E-mail Automation what-so-ever, you'll pay $10/month just for Abandoned Cart Recovery E-mails

- Are you a franchise with individually owned locations? No support for that.

- You can only add one merchant gateway on your entire account, but you can have up to 100 locations. But if each locations needs a separate bank account, NOPE.

- Loyalty and Customer Data does not sync between multiple lightspeed accounts to help remedy the above.

- Online documentation is wrong about 80% of the time.

- Importing products, customer data, etc is chaotic at best.

- The eCommerce features are not in sync with the PoS side.

- Loyalty program doesn't just have a "For every 100 points get $1 off" option, you have to set very static discounts for loyalty

- Customer service takes weeks to respond if you have any issue outside of what Support can handle

- Tech Support will respond with "Lightspeed doesn't currently offer a feature like that, you can custom develop your own though using our API."

- Every action you need done, will require another department to speak to, which they'll get back to you weeks later.

Alternatives envisagées 

WooCommerce

Pourquoi choisir Lightspeed Retail 

Shopify no longer supports cannabis companies.

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

The sales person promised things that in reality were never going to happen.

Avantages

Ease of use I think is primary amongst my reasons, personally.

Inconvénients

I feel like I could have probably had a better explanation of add-ons and additional costs for those add-ons. I was under the impression that the system was going to come with all of the functionality that I needed for the money that I was spending. I think part of that is probably on me, though. I was doing a lot of shopping around and it's possible that I could have gotten some information crossed. The other thing is the support. I thought I'd get a little more hands on support to get things up and going considering we have never had a retail store or ever done any of this type of setup in the past and it seemed like I was left to figure a lot of things out for myself, which I did, but that took a lot of extra time and I think it would have gone quite a bit faster if I had some extra support in the beginning. Aside from that I wish my account manager was good for something other than selling me extra product. It seems like any kind of support is lost on that person.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

- 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

Avantages

I love the inventory tracking from anywhere, the ease of entering and pricing my inventory, and the setup process and new POS - basically I love EVERYTHING!

Inconvénients

I have been using this system for a few months and have yet to come across anything negative.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

*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.

Avantages

Nothing
In theory, the reporting
In theory, the inventory management

Inconvénients

Over promised
Under delivered
Zero communication

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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!

Avantages

I really appreciate the seamless integration between the POS and the eCommerce. I also really like that this is all web-based, so that a computer can be used for the interface rather than a cash register that will only serve one function. When there is a problem, Lightspeed is usually ahead of me in giving notice that there is one and gives the approximate timing for the fix. Also, if you have both components and the payment processor is down (like at Christmas), you can easily set up the purchase online and your customer can process their goods and walk out of the shop a happy customer.

Inconvénients

It feels like the frameworks for the eCommerce should be a little easier to use, but I've had much less robust platforms. Also, I'm still trying to find a better solution for shipping for the kind of shop that I have, but don't actually blame Lightspeed. It would be great if there were a more integrated and less expensive phone app add-on for shopping.

Alternatives envisagées 

Shopify

Pourquoi choisir Lightspeed Retail 

I didn't like the platform. It wasn't made for a business like mine.

Logiciel antérieur 

Shopify

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

I needed a robust POS that made it easy to retail the handmade products that we craft in our shop. We often have multiple versions of the same product in regard to scent and quantity. Also, the ability to monitor the inventory for both the brick-and-mortar and the eCommerce portions of our business is invaluable. I have stayed with them, because they didn't stop with their superior customer service after the contracts were signed. It also seems like a system that will grow with us. I chose them, when I was taking my business from a kitchen "cottage" style business to a full time shop with eCommerce. I don't regret it.

Avantages

I tinkered with this software and got ot know this from the inside and out. I like the functionalities as it allows you to break free from the spreadsheet and manual entry. Gone are the days of tallying and doing adjustments on a piece of paper. It has filter functions for reporting, it auto calculates taxes by assigning it in the initial setup, browser printing integration, you can conveniently import inventory from a csv file to your POS system and export those reports in a csv format. The hardware associated to it works seamlessly like the tablets, scanners, and printers. Although , it endorses Apple products, it works perfectly fine with Windows operating systems. It also has a companion product which is called Lightspeed Accounting that is comparable to Quickbooks

Inconvénients

A few bugs are slowly being fixed as each maintenance and update is released, just like any other software. Although workarounds can be done to remedy it, but you'd have to seek assistance from Tech Support.

Alternatives envisagées 

QuickBooks Enterprise

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

We were after functionalities that Lightspeed can provide. Although both of them are similar, the interface is more user-friendly compared to Quickbooks. And that is important for us, since learning a new tool can be taxing with the time you need to spend navigating and learning it from the inside and out.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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 envisagées 

Shopify

Pourquoi choisir 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

Pourquoi passer à 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

Avantages

I really like that I am able to customize our website and integrate third party apps & APIs easily. And the customer service, the customer service is top notch! Through migration and implementation, the Lightspeed team was right there. At a moment's notice, I can chat with the team or give them a call. Although I may be a one-woman tech team, I have help! It's such a blessing to have a support team for our business. It has been easy to integrate all of our business critical resources and provide a more unified experience for our employees. Employees can access customer data, order data, shipping data, marketing data and product data in one platform. I've been able to customize our store template to our specific business needs and design requirements. It's been a developer's dream.

Inconvénients

My main dislike is that I don't have FTP access to my files on LS servers. This would be extremely helpful to optimize our images as needed.

I also would like to upload customer data myself. At this time, to upload customer data in bulk, I have to send the data to Lightspeed for import.

More options for discounts and coupons would be helpful - BOGO, Buy 2 Get One, or FREE Shipping codes based on domestic addresses only (not international).

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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 envisagées 

Microsoft Project et QuickBooks Online

Logiciel antérieur 

Microsoft Project et QuickBooks Online

Pourquoi passer à 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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

The best feature of LIghtspeed is the analytics package. As a senior manager you can spend a lot of time calculating your performance manually in excel. But the Analytics package takes care of all of that. It's easy to see the performance of your inventory, employees and marketing at any time. There are also a lot of apps that work with Lightspeed that make it the most functional POS system I've used. The fact that the ecommerce is integrated as well makes it a great fully integrated system. You could pay a lot more to piece together all the of the systems you need. Or you could spend a huge amount of money creating a custom system.

Inconvénients

There are some small idiosyncrasies like not adjusting sync times for your local time zone. So, yesterday is never accurate you have to wait for the next days sync to get have accurate information. I would also like to be able to have our time management app sync employee time to Lightspeed so we don't have to enter it manually. I've given up on tracking employee hourly performance for this reason. Or if they offered a better time clock management natively that would help. I'd also like them to include the previous year comparisons in their dashboard. And, I'd like to look at seasonal performance rather than just month to month and week to week.

Alternatives envisagées 

Clover

Pourquoi choisir Lightspeed Retail 

I wanted a cloud based integrated system

Logiciel antérieur 

Clover

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

I looked at a couple of others too that I can't remember. A lot of them had great features, but none of them had all of the features to have a fully integrated system for our customers to shop online or in person. And, none of them had the analytics tools that Lightspeed has.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

- 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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Nice user interface. Good features for a shop that does service work. Cloud-based software makes it easy and convenient.

Inconvénients

Our bike shop has been using Lightspeed for 5 years now, first with their Mac based software, and then with their cloud based software (Lightspeed Retail). There are many great things about the software, but on the whole I would not recommend a small business owner to hitch their cart to this company. There are significant bugs, inventory control is a disaster, but worst of all, fundamentally Lightspeed does not care about their customers. What Lightspeed cares about is their roadmap which in most cases doesn't deal with fundemental issues that their customers have been bringing up for years - if you have any doubt on this, look at their "ideas" page where top voted on features and requests have sat dormant for years.

My frustration has boiled over due to an issue with the way their inventory system works, and the way their customer service team has responded to my pleading that they at least give me an ETA on a fix. Here's the backstory: Lightspeed does a very peculiar thing which is that it will auto-add inventory if a product is sold but does not exist in inventory. Not only this, but Lightspeed will auto-check-in inventory off of POs if a product is sold. Now this in and of itself is a disaster as far as accountability is concerned: how is one supposed to track POs when product mysteriously gets checked in! But the worst part is that there is a bug in their system which will auto-check-in product off of POs if product is put into a work order. Doesn't matter if said product is sold or not, it will check-in the product regardless, causing a nightmare scenario where we are trying to figure out what POs have truly been received, and which POs Lightspeed has decided to receive automatically.

I brought this issue up for the first time around 6 months ago, and never got any solid response on a fix. I contacted support in April again. After a lot of back and forth about whether this was a real problem (like I love spending time contacting support) the support tech Derrick agreed that this was an issue. I asked for an ETA. No ETA was available.

I followed up a month later in May. Still no ETA, but Derrick assured me this was a priority, but also assured my significant problem that is causing myself and my staff time and frustration and vigilance and additional systems and workflows to remedy is "an extreme edge case scenario so I'm curious about how it could be causing you significant workflow issues."

So now we are in July. This supposedly "high priority" "extreme edge case" bug is still not fixed. No ETA. No communication. Since we started experiencing this issue Lightspeed has stuck an e-commerce link in the middle of the navigation bar and continued to work on integrating their e-commerece into every other cranny of the software, even if you don't use their e-commerce. They've added a new feature called Analytics which costs additional monthly fees. Their API is still slow and unsupported. Their App marketplace is effectively a Potemkin village of fake apps with no real syncing with the silo that is Lightspeed.

The promises of a cloud based POS are so great, but Lightspeed does not deliver. If you are looking to invest time and energy in a retail POS platform, I would strongly encourage you to look elsewhere. Lightspeed looks very slick on the surface, and it is quite good in many ways, but the underlying company culture does not put their customers first.

Avantages

The check-out system is nice and easy.
For multi-locations it is helpful to see sales and inventory in one place.

Inconvénients

-there is no flexibility in the system. The way Lightspeed wants you to see and retrieve your data is the ONLY way you can get your data. And their way 90% of the time is not relevant to the basic needs of a retailer to analyze and evaluate their business.
-Customer Service is not responsive. The company does not seem willing to listen to complaints or provide work arounds to the rigidity of the system.
- The eCom site is FULL of problems that they do not have a handle on. There are many limitations with the way you have to present information on the site.
-It's very expensive for what you get. I was willing to pay a premium for a system I was told would exceed our needs and expectations. For the 2 things it does well, there are 98 headaches.
-They do not offer refunds or a way out of your contract if you are unhappy.

Avantages

Great reporting, easy to use simplicity. Constantly improving the software, interface, features, etc. It is superb for inventory management. Gift Cards are easy to use, re-use, re-charge, etc. Customer loyalty programs are being integrated, once more are integrated, this platform will be far above the competition.
This platform is great for starting small, or large. It has all the features you didn't know you would need. With constant feedback from customers like myself, they are constantly listening and improving the retail POS systems.
I know I list quite a few things I don't like, but the software's great qualities far exceed the negatives, which may be phased out sooner or later with updates.

Inconvénients

Cloud based, when it has issues, you are stuck with just an iPad or Computer. Nothing can be done with the systems. No sales, no reports, nothing. The Technology division reports that they are working to improve infrastructure, so I hope that happens before the 2015 holiday season. They are a very popular POS system and are growing very fast.

Credit Card readers are subpar with Element Payments, but improving. Plus the EMV card readers are due in a couple of months. I've used both the headphone & lightning connector styles for the iPad. Each have positives and negatives. The headphone card reader wears out if you swipe alot, I swipe approx 25-50/day and its lasted about 8 months and is constant on reading cards. Lightning connector card reader isn't designed to be used while charging your iPad. So if you run 50+ transactions in a day on the iPad, you will need to remove the card reader to charge the iPad mid day, because charging the iPad through the card reader takes so long that the iPad uses power faster than its recharged, so removing the card reader to keep the iPad charged is a nuisance. Also the micro usb charging port on the Lightning Card reader looses its connection like all micro USB connectors typically do with wear. The iPad uses Wifi & Bluetooth all day for the internet and barcode reader, so it drains the power quickly. I may switch to the computer versions for holidays when we are busy and cant be recharging the iPad all the time.

When you create your account, be ready to be charged for each employee after you have more than 7 in the system. If you don't keep track of employee sales, times, etc using the system, then a single pin for each sale will work, but if you want to use all the employee tracking features for sales, time, you have to pay for each employee you add to the system after 7 I believe. I use 9-12 employees off and on, so I have to pay for each one for the full year after #7. The employee's should be included in the package price, up to 15, then have a price structure for the next 5, not each one. It becomes more expensive as you grow as a business and want to keep track of employee data.

It has no commissions structure. So if you want to give commissions, you have to do that manually with your reporting data.

Avantages

...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.

Inconvénients

-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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I have installed numerous POS systems in my 30+ years of experience. LightSpeed is by far the most comprehensive system, yet easiest system to implement and use.

There support mechanism is second to none. If you look your question up in help, there will be documentation to answer your question, and chances are there is a video that walks you step by step through the solution.

If you feel like you want to get live help, there chat mechanism is one of the best, better yet, the support people on the chat are the most patient and knowledgeable support people in the business.

Simply the best.

Inconvénients

I don't have any comments for this section

Avantages

clean and pretty interfaces that are easy for the employees to use.

Inconvénients

no inventory control (software times out when you reconcile a count) Customers have to wait between 30 seconds and 3 minutes when a credit card is run! the cashiers can not sort inventory items by price or quantity on hand.

Avantages

I have been using Lightspeed Retail for 2 years, and the overall experience has been great. We chose this software over others because of its great inventory system. Lightspeed is one of the best out there in terms of inventory management. It has many options to play with, making it easy to integrate your business. They have exceptional customer service (live chat available every day).

Inconvénients

Lightspeed is still growing. We could compare it to a startup with a great community behind it, but it is still implementing changes daily to become a better software. The POS system could have a better interface when using a tablet. The interface is simple but differs greatly when used on a computer. I would enjoy a more visual interface for its POS system. The barcode system works great, but I highly recommend spending a reasonable amount of money on the scanner to avoid many issues. We also use lightspeed e-commerce. Connecting retail and e-commerce together is easy, but it gets tricky if you need help from third parties apps. Lightspeed is not the best when connecting to a third party yet (they don't offer many options).

Avantages

it's pretty easy, the inventory entering is easy, sales are easy. Reports are good, although none of them integrate, you have to pull 3-4 reports to get what you need unless you upgrade to way more $

Inconvénients

This is an app based program, so there are definite issues using this with an iPad, which is how we run our retail store. The gift card has been a problem from day one which we have reported many time and have an open ongoing unresolved case. We purchased the gift card from the company they recommended and they both point fingers at each other, meanwhile it is a nightmare for our customers who have to sit & wait while we figure out how to make their return or issue a gift card. Still not resolved. The cache fills up and you have to delete the app and reload it or certain functions do not work, like getting a new customers name in the system. The last thing you want to deal with is deleting an ap and reloading it. Customer service on management level is incredibly slow to respond if they ever do. The day to day service is very responsive.
The rep also over sold us the program and sold us 2 registers and so we over paid $1,000 a year for 3 years until we caught it. Never heard back from upper management regarding a credit or a few free months.
They are very responsive when you are up for review though! ALSO beware of their own integrative payment processing that they tell you will save you a lot of $, not really true.Get it in writing. First of all they will take their fee right off the top daily, so forget trying to reconcile your statement with your daily reports. You will get paid for Wed, Thur & friday the following Tuesday...so your cash flow is delayed. Way slow!!!!!!

Alternatives envisagées 

Clover et Shopify

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

5 years ago it was the best option.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Nothing at all, if I could leave 0 reviews I would. Total waste of time if you have an e-commerce business that needs POS integration.

Inconvénients

Avoid! Representatives promise the world and the software does not deliver. Charged us for the full contract term up front and are refusing to apply refund even though we cooled off within 24 hours of sign up - once we realised what had been promised was not at all functional. Don’t waste your time or money.

Avantages

The user interface and integration with e-commerce and payments makes it a one stop shop for all your pos needs.

Inconvénients

The e-commerce web design is the most challenging part, but with time it becomes easier.

Alternatives envisagées 

Clover et Shopify

Pourquoi passer à Lightspeed Retail

The integration of all services and simple billing.

Avantages

The fully integrated credit card payments has been wonderful, not having to use two separate systems to complete the sale has been great. Also the integrated inventory between retail and ecom has been great. Sell it in one place and inventory get adjusted across all platforms. Also the ability to use multiple registers at once and complete payments at the same time has been a life saver.

Inconvénients

The additional cost for some of the features in the ecom, such as different layouts for the website that would incorporate things such as reviews on other websites. The limited analytical information you have at your disposal without having to pay for lightspeed analytics.

Avantages

Nothing, I really have no positive things to say about Lightspeed Retail.

Inconvénients

Apart from the fact that it is cloud based which caused so many connectivity problems (constantly unable to even connect to make sales) it also apparently means that Lightspeed owns all of your data once you no longer have a good standing account with them. What I mean by that is that once you no longer have lightspeed service, you can no longer look at your sales data without paying a $50 a month per location fee to access sales info. If a report didn't completely transfer when trying to download a csv file of a report, to bad. You don't get access to it any more.

Avantages

- 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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

We operate 4 Cannonball Cafés in Jamaica. This is our second year of using Lightspeed. When we bought the business in 2016, we installed another company's system which, after a few months use, revealed it's weakness for use in a multi-unit business.

We plodded along for awhile under the "Better to stay with the Devil you know..." philosophy until a sharp eyed customer got very upset because she noticed the price of one of our specialty coffees at one location was vastly different from another location... we had made a late night keystroke mistake entering the updated prices!

What caught our eye with Lightspeed was the powerful Back-of-House infrastructure that allows us to make REMOTE CHANGES to our menus, our controls etc IN AN INSTANT on our phones, tablets or computers: last year on a trip to China, we got a text from one of our managers requesting a menu addition - somewhere over the Pacific at 40,000 feet, my wife added the item and went back to sleep!!!! The level of detail that supports our business goes far beyond what we could imagine - while a lot of detail & thought has to go into setting up Lightspeed initially, that effort pays dividends when using the system.

Finally, the support we get from the Technical Support team is amazing - the Techs are all very well trained, are extremely knowledgeable and can resolve problems that are outside their Lightspeed purview: in September, a store was having a weird connectivity problem that was traced by [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] in Te

Inconvénients

Have not found anything to dislike about it.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

I have always like the way the system is produced from the Service personnel's prospective & The way CDK tries to customize the product for each of the specific user's or Locations.

Inconvénients

I think this system could be improved by having the ability to communicate with & Be programed with available patches to adapt the system to communicate and share info with all other outside vendor's and the coinciding systems that they use.
Every company will have separate systems all that are needed for what type of Service it provides. - IE.
*( Scheduling a Boat's launch for Valet Service or for Spring launch of boats for pickups ect. )
*( A customer Text communications program for Receiving, Sending or Monitoring text conversations ect.)
Each will always require some type of outside applications like those for that specific company to operate and function more efficiently over what is offered in any DMS System. I believe this to be true for all software DMS company's on the market & this is including light speed EVO.
Is it impossible to Make an Automotive or Marine type DMS system that all Info could be shared across to and back from any of The other software system types that are used externally?
I believe that would be a great benefit for any and all company's that need a DMS Fixed operations type Repair or Maintience operating systems.

Avantages

Super easy to use and teach to new team members. Lots of features, including easy, returns, and refunds.

Inconvénients

We have had some slower customer support especially during busy retail times.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I love how easy to use it is. It connects my store inventory to my website really easily.

Inconvénients

I wish there was an app where I could easily see what sold for the day and what we did in terms of total sales.

Avantages

Inventory and ecommerce are great but not worth the payment processing problems

Inconvénients

The payment processing has gone down for 30 minutes to two days about 7 times in a year and a half. This is not acceptable in brick and mortar. While the retail R system is good for ecommerce and inventory management, the payment processing is not even close to the square experience. I use square at a separate location and payment processing has gone down one time in the same timeframe. Also square processes payments about 3 times faster than the archaic verifone provided by lightspeed.

Alternatives envisagées 

Square Payments