Lightspeed Retail Reviews

Its ease of use is probably the number one factor, but it is followed by the live inventory on the internet. The program is continuously evolving and improving and the staff has been great!

The only real draw back I see is that there is no offline function.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Easy setup with great support from staff. Great reporting capability. Easy to set up users, products, etc. Great support staff who will help with any and all issues at any time. Can handle almost any need that a restaurant has.

Longer learning curve than some other systems but with practice is becomes easy to use.

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.

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.

Lightspeed is very user friendly and easy to teach employees how to use it. The reporting is top-notch and they even can help you create custom reports which was very important to us. Customer service is excellent and always very responsive.

It would be great if it came with a built in CRM or integrated with one like Salesforce. It's great for franchisees, as a small business, but for the franchisor it may not have all the functionality needed to roll it out to the entire corporate system.

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.

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 $

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!!!!!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.