Lightspeed Retail Reviews

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

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

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.

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.

I have nothing good to report about this POS system. We recently used this POS for a festival and the system, system support and ease of use was so disastrous that every single trader was unhappy with the system. We have done many festivals, used many different POS systems, but this system was clunky, it took 11 push button steps to complete a transaction and the support on site was literally non-existent. As a consequence, the customers had to wait, and we had to spend valuable time looking at the entries of the system rather than interacting with the customers. At the festival we lost opportunities to talk about our product and we lost sales.

The system is clunky, unfriendly to use in a mobile setting and not in touch with customer service.

Ease of use for all levels of users. Easy to reconcile the cashouts, data is formatted nicely

Might not be the best software for a larger retailer with a ton of inventory.

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

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

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.

I don't have any comments for this section

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

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.

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.

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.

We use this to manage cross channel inventory with our warehouse and ecommerce site.

It does not have a direct integration with WooCommerce leading to the purchase of more software for the integration and another third party system. Also you can not send direct invoices with a link for payment processing.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being able to always be connected to our point of sale via my phone or computer, no matter where I am has been crucial. With Lightspeed being cloud based, I can work from anywhere I want. I am able to ring up customers on my phone if needed, create purchase orders from trade shows, and stay connected to customers at all times.

There aren't any real issues that we have had with Lightspeed. They are continuing to improve the workflow with Lightspeed eCom which will only make the overall package even better.

We most liked the back of house features it offered. The inventory piece, reporting and ease of use was instrumental in our decision to switch to LightSpeed. We loved the cloud based feature and it allows our staff to work from anywhere on reports, watch sales, reorder inventory, etc.

There really hasn't been anything about the software that we've found was difficult or wished was different.

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.

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.

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

Over promised
Under delivered
Zero communication

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.

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.

- 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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.