Lightspeed POS Overview
What is Lightspeed POS?
Lightspeed POS is a complete point of sale and inventory management tool that simplifies time-consuming tasks like inventory and employee management, so you can focus on taking care of your customers and growing your business. Access detailed sales reports in minutes and easily identify best-selling items or use the built-in customer profiles to provide personalized service that will increase customer loyalty.
Lightspeed Retail Features:
Inventory management
- Easily create product variations such as size, color and material by using the efficient matrix system.
- Combine purchasing, transferring and multiple vendors into one master order.
- Process special orders, layaways and work orders.
- Create, track, and assign serial numbers to products.
- Bundle individual items to sell them as a package.
Free Onboarding & 24/7 Support
- Benefit from a dedicated team who help you get started in a 1:1 session.
- Get live chat, email and phone support with our support heros located around the world.
Employee management
- Intuitive, easy-to-learn interface for your employees.
- Create a simple and logical workflow that suits your business.
- Customizable user permissions give you full control over employees’ access to your system.
- Track sales by employee and access performance reports for your staff.
- Control employee access to information such as refunds, the ability to edit products and pricing, or view sales data.
Reporting
- Track sales and inventory numbers with reports that make it easy to see sales, profits and changes over time.
- Identify opportunities for growth and business improvement.
- Learn which employees are your top performers.
- Get a clear view of your customers’ needs and habits.
- Pull-up end of day reports to access key data that will help you prepare for peak periods and better understand your customers’ needs.
- Access all this data from your device anytime, from anywhere.
Lightspeed Loyalty:
-Highly targeted rewards program with a branded customer-facing web-app to track points.
-Create automated campaigns via SMS and a drag-and-drop email builder.
Lightspeed Payments:
*only available in the US
-Complete sales and get paid without ever leaving your POS. Game changer.
-Built-in PCI compliance and fraud prevention.
Hardware:
- Integrate your system with hardware such as barcode scanners and cash drawers to reduce checkout times.
- Reduce credit card fraud with EMV.
- Accept all major credit cards and Apple Pay®.
Integrated eCommerce:
- Sell in-store and online with Lightspeed’s fully integrated eCommerce solution, Lightspeed eCom.
- Get a centralized view of your inventory, customers and sales data across in-store and online channels.
Our network of over 250 integration partners allows you to tailor Lightspeed to your business’ needs
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lightspeed Restaurant features
Menu and floorplan:
- Easily create discounts that automatically apply to customer groups, promotional events or specific items.
- Combining tables or moving them around is as simple as tap and drag.
- Present menu items complete with photos, descriptions and prices.
- Make quick updates to your floorplan.
Ordering and payments:
- Smartphone and tablet-based tableside orders are sent directly to the kitchen or bar.
- Cut down on the time it takes for customers to get their orders.
- Easily split or combine bills.
- Offer flexible payment options.
- Servers can take orders directly from the iPad for quicker service and more accurate orders.
- Process gift cards
Offline mode:
- Internet down? Don't sweat it. Lightspeed Restaurant POS works online or offline with a full feature set
- Your data is kept safe even if your terminal is permanently damaged.
- Look up customer information for take-out or delivery orders.
- Liteserver stays up at all times, so operations go on as usual. Once a connection is reestablished, your data is automatically synced.
Integrations:
- Add the Kitchen Display System module for optimized communication between the kitchen and the front of the house.
- Add the Customer Facing Display module to optimize communication between your staff and customers.
- Add the Self Order Menu module to allow customers to place their own orders.
Our network of over 250 integration partners allows you to tailor Lightspeed to your business’ specific needs such as accounting, delivery or loyalty programs.
Lightspeed POS Overview
Pricing
Pricing options
Lightspeed Retail
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $99 / month
(1 register, 5 employees)
Medium package $169 / month
(2 registers, 10 employees)
Large package $289 / month
(4 registers, 20 employees)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lightspeed Restaurant
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $69 / month
(1 POS station)
Medium package $129 / month
(Up to 3 POS stations)
Large package $198 / month
(Up to 5 POS stations)
Lightspeed POS Features
Screenshots
Lightspeed POS Reviews
Lightspeed POS Reviews
Great integrated system
Lightspeed has been great. We have been using it for over a year and it has met my expectations. Whenever I request help, which isn't that often anymore they are quick to respond.
Best decision I made for my business!
Overall, I would recommend Lightspeed POS to any other retailer (especially clothing and shoes) in a heartbeat! If you have been manually counting inventory and have no customer sales data, this is a must. It was easy to set up and continued to be easy to use for me and my employees. The cloud based feature is perfect because I never have to worry about backing up important data and I can "see" my business from any device with internet access. It's brilliant.
Frequent Outages
Overall, the system provides all that we need. Problem is, we don't know if the system will be online when we need it.
Best POS System in the Business
We had two separate Retail POS systems in our organization. One was so antiquated it had to be replaced and the second one was experiencing issues everyday and the support was lousy.
We purchased LightSpeed. I had the Retail Operators go through the setup videos and make decisions on how they wanted to setup the system based on the videos. Then, when the Operators completed their training, I had them configure LightSpeed themselves based on what they learned and the decisions they made. We then entered the inventory and the rest is history. I would recommend LightSpeed to anyone looking for a retail POS no matter what size.
!!SMALL BUSINESS WARNING!! NOT FAIR
!!WARNING!!! THIS COMPANY IS NOT FAIR!
They bundled in the loyalty program in our automatic renewal. We were looking into the addition to see if it fits our business. Another $800 was tacked on to our renewal for the Loyalty program that I did not authorize. They are refusing to refund the Loyalty program fee say that we are in a contract and they have a phone recording committing to the contract (they won't actual share the recording though). We have no need for this extra program at the moment, have not used it and do not plan to use it at this time as our business volume has a ceiling and the margins do not support it at this time. We understand the value in the loyalty program by cannot presently justify it.
I have not worked for or worked with a company that does not work fairly with their customers.
I do not recommend LightSpeed and am stuck with them for another 11 months and plan to find a better POS partner.
Compare overall rating with alternatives
Compare with alternatives
Great integrated system
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Best decision I made for my business!
Overall, I would recommend Lightspeed POS to any other retailer (especially clothing and shoes) in a heartbeat! If you have been manually counting inventory and have no customer sales data, this is a must. It was easy to set up and continued to be easy to use for me and my employees. The cloud based feature is perfect because I never have to worry about backing up important data and I can "see" my business from any device with internet access. It's brilliant.
Pros
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!
Cons
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.
Frequent Outages
Overall, the system provides all that we need. Problem is, we don't know if the system will be online when we need it.
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.
Response from Lightspeed
Hello Zach,
Thank you for your feedback. We would like to sincerely apologize for your recent experience, and we are sorry to hear you were less than satisfied with the product and service received. It is our utmost priority to provide a product and service that allows our customers to focus on running their businesses with ease.We will have someone from our Customer Success Team reach out to you shortly.
Thank you,
Lightspeed POS
Best POS System in the Business
We had two separate Retail POS systems in our organization. One was so antiquated it had to be replaced and the second one was experiencing issues everyday and the support was lousy.
We purchased LightSpeed. I had the Retail Operators go through the setup videos and make decisions on how they wanted to setup the system based on the videos. Then, when the Operators completed their training, I had them configure LightSpeed themselves based on what they learned and the decisions they made. We then entered the inventory and the rest is history. I would recommend LightSpeed to anyone looking for a retail POS no matter what size.
Pros
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.
Cons
I don't have any comments for this section
!!SMALL BUSINESS WARNING!! NOT FAIR
!!WARNING!!! THIS COMPANY IS NOT FAIR!
They bundled in the loyalty program in our automatic renewal. We were looking into the addition to see if it fits our business. Another $800 was tacked on to our renewal for the Loyalty program that I did not authorize. They are refusing to refund the Loyalty program fee say that we are in a contract and they have a phone recording committing to the contract (they won't actual share the recording though). We have no need for this extra program at the moment, have not used it and do not plan to use it at this time as our business volume has a ceiling and the margins do not support it at this time. We understand the value in the loyalty program by cannot presently justify it.
I have not worked for or worked with a company that does not work fairly with their customers.
I do not recommend LightSpeed and am stuck with them for another 11 months and plan to find a better POS partner.
Pros
The software is comprehensive. Many add-ons are available at high costs.
Cons
It can get complicated and takes some effort to train new staff.
Support is good for the software although I have found that are led down the wrong path and wast time. Some of the representatives are not knowledgeable enough.
Response from Lightspeed
Hello Vaughn,
We would like to apologize for your recent experience with Lightspeed and hope that we can work with you in order to get things moving in the right direction. We see that you have been in touch with our Customer Success team and we encourage you to continue working with them.
Thank you,
Lightspeed POS
Compare user recommendation rating with alternatives
Compare with alternatives
Lightspeed POS Pricing
Lightspeed POS Pricing
Lightspeed Retail
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $99 / month
(1 register, 5 employees)
Medium package $169 / month
(2 registers, 10 employees)
Large package $289 / month
(4 registers, 20 employees)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lightspeed Restaurant
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $69 / month
(1 POS station)
Medium package $129 / month
(Up to 3 POS stations)
Large package $198 / month
(Up to 5 POS stations)
Lightspeed Retail
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $99 / month
(1 register, 5 employees)
Medium package $169 / month
(2 registers, 10 employees)
Large package $289 / month
(4 registers, 20 employees)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lightspeed Restaurant
(Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.)
Small package $69 / month
(1 POS station)
Medium package $129 / month
(Up to 3 POS stations)
Large package $198 / month
(Up to 5 POS stations)
Compare value for money rating with alternatives
Compare with alternatives
Lightspeed POS Features
Lightspeed POS Features
Compare features rating with alternatives
Compare with alternatives
Categories
Categories
Video Tutorials
Video Tutorials
Additional information for Lightspeed POS
Additional information for Lightspeed POS
Key features of Lightspeed POS
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Assemble items into packages
- Connect directly with suppliers
- Custom label printing
- Inventory syncs across all stores, including online
- Native iPad application
- Product matrices
- Purchase orders
- Reorder points
- Serialized items
- Transfers between stores
Benefits
We're dedicated to building not just the best point of sale, but the best business management tools:
- Desktop & iPad: Process payments on the floor and engage your customers by getting away from the counter.
- Inventory Control: Track your stock, submit purchase orders, and even set up automatic re-order points.
- eCommerce: Extend your retail presence by syncing your existing inventory to your integrated web store.
-Loyalty: Highly targeted rewards program with a branded customer-facing web-app to track points.
-Payments: everything you need to process sales and get paid in one place.
-Accounting: A seamless integration between your point of sale and accounting software for a painless day at the office.
Lightspeed POS FAQs
Lightspeed POS FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Lightspeed POS.
Q. What type of pricing plans does Lightspeed POS offer?
Lightspeed POS offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$69.00/month
Pricing model: One Time License, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Lightspeed Retail (Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.) Small package $99 / month (1 register, 5 employees) Medium package $169 / month (2 registers, 10 employees) Large package $289 / month (4 registers, 20 employees) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Lightspeed Restaurant (Prices are in USD based on an annual plan, on a per store basis.) Small package $69 / month (1 POS station) Medium package $129 / month (Up to 3 POS stations) Large package $198 / month (Up to 5 POS stations)
Q. What are the main features of Lightspeed POS?
Lightspeed POS offers the following features:
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Assemble items into packages
- Connect directly with suppliers
- Custom label printing
- Inventory syncs across all stores, including online
- Native iPad application
- Product matrices
- Purchase orders
- Reorder points
- Serialized items
- Transfers between stores
Q. Who are the typical users of Lightspeed POS?
Lightspeed POS has the following typical customers:
Mid Size Business, Small Business
Q. What languages does Lightspeed POS support?
Lightspeed POS supports the following languages:
Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish
Q. What type of pricing plans does Lightspeed POS offer?
Lightspeed POS has the following pricing plans:
One Time License, Subscription
Q. Does Lightspeed POS support mobile devices?
Lightspeed POS supports the following devices:
iPad
Q. What other apps does Lightspeed POS integrate with?
Lightspeed POS integrates with the following applications:
Bitium, Countr, Deputy, Justuno, Loyalzoo, Lumiary, Mailjet, Marketman, SimpliField, Stitch Labs
Q. What level of support does Lightspeed POS offer?
Lightspeed POS offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
Lightspeed has been great. We have been using it for over a year and it has met my expectations. Whenever I request help, which isn't that often anymore they are quick to respond.