Lightspeed Retail Reviews

Pros

I moved from Lightspeed to Clover and it's night and day. I had to piecemeal the Clover system on the back end to be useful and Lightspeed hands you so much. I've since added more and more of the Lightspeed system like loyalty because their tools are amazing. One of the best parts is their customer service. You get quick answers and they go above and beyond. Whether it's something as simple as why isn't my shipping working on ecom or how can I verify my website with the different social media platforms, their FAQs and customer service team never disappoint. If you are thinking about switching, do it. You won't regret it. It's made me more efficient all around. Thanks Lightspeed!

Cons

Lots of different options so it takes a bit to determine what you need to use.

Alternatives Considered

Square Point of Sale, Shopify POS and Revel Systems

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Clover wouldn't allow me to do a website. Lightspeed integrates inventory on the brick and mortar and ecommerce sides.

Switched From

Square Point of Sale, Shopify POS and Revel Systems

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Best integration of inventory, ease of use, I liked all the different standard things the system had like inventory POs, employees, special orders, and more.

Pros

It is easy to use as you can search for the individual items and put items in categories. It also enable us to put in modifier on each item with additional price too

Cons

Very expensive compared to other POS. Only if the report format can be modified to be a little bit more simpler

Pros

When it was Shopkeep.
It has only gotten worse with every update.

Cons

They buy out the competition and change the system to a new hybrid version every other year.

Pros

Software is intact, does not give random errors. you can count on

Cons

it is a bit hard to settle if you have an inventory at some other software. it would be better to have more sync options.

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

The POS itself works great. Easy to add payment options and has optional fields for many aspects of the system.

Cons

Cannot use it for delivery management. The "Service" option seems like it was designed for car dealership maintenance services and requires workarounds to be created for delivery services. It is mainly a retail "Take With" system.

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

Remote access is indispensable. Support is always available.

Cons

Price is high, but competitive as it includes all features that are often addon's with other products.

Pros

Accuracy is very important and when I run a report or look at inventory it is correct.

Cons

The sales person told me I would have reports and I did for about 4 months, I was then locked out of the reports and could not pay my suppliers. I had to pay more money per month based on their employees mistake. I went with Lightspeed based on the monthly price. It is not completely what I needed for my store but the price was within my budget. Now I have to pay hundreds more per year so I can run one report to pay my suppliers. Be warned they do not stand behind their employees promises.

Alternatives Considered

KORONA POS and POS Nation for Retail

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

They told me they would import my inventory and have the description on the screen, they did the import a week later, and it did not include the tax, when they fixed that it duplicated all my inventory, weeks later they decided they could not fulfill the promises they made. I canceled my account and they still sent me a bill for the months after I canceled. I ask for RMA for hardware and they did not send. I paid for the shipping and then received 3 RMA labels. They still want me to pay for the software a month after their hardware left my store.

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Price, which I was not given the correct information.

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

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 user interface was my first draw to Lightspeed. Ease of use and mostly easy workflows pulled me in. We also like the numerous integratabtle add ons available. The multi-store feature works well.

Cons

It did not believe in negative numbers but that is changing. We do not like that custom fields don't save the same way as other standard fields.

Alternatives Considered

Quickbooks Point of Sale

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

When we changed the interface of RetailPro was not very friendly.

Switched From

Quickbooks Point of Sale

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

We had multiple stores and we needed the transfer and multi-store management that Lightspeed offers. We were also looking for a point of sale that integrated well with ecommerce.

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

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

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

Cons

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.

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

...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

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

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

Have not found anything to dislike about it.

Pros

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

Cons

-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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.