Lightspeed has literally saved us 20-30 hours per week. It connects and communicates well with all of our other systems; including accounting and loyalty platforms. Their customer and technical support have been extraordinary and have exceeded our expectations. In fact, I think their technical support is the best not just in the point of sale industry but any industry. I find myself wishing other vendors I work with had the same level of support and professionalism. Lightspeed also listens to their customers; this is evident by requests made in their support area. They actually respond to every request. As a small business owner, we worry about many things. Lightspeed is not one of them!

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.

Overall, the software does a great job in helping Accountants, managers and front liners in the Retail industry. What's great is that it integrates with ECommerce to be more efficient in selling your products out there, not just from the brick and mortar setup, but in the online as well.

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

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.

Its like the DMV and TSA started a POS company

I wanted to share my recent experience with Lightspeed POS and their customer support

Nothing but a nightmare since we signed the contract. Some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced. Haven’t even been able to get the POS up and running. Support is no help, and our onboarding person is non communitive. Less than a month in and we have no working POS systems. When I reached out to cancel my contract they threatened me with a $4k fine for breaking contract.

Easy to use, however Merchant allows debit card to proceed with a chargeback without returning the merchandise , scary and dangerous for any business.

Merchant allows debit card to proceed with a chargeback without returning the merchandise , scary and dangerous for any 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.

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

We are a 40 year Brick and Mortar AND E-commerce company that carries 1000s of unique skus. Needing a software that is heavier than just the POS is essential. Inventory management and the ability to integrate with E-commerce was a non-negotiable for my next POS. Lightspeed does have some frequent, mostly minor bugs, it is nice that they constantly update and enhance their program. There often seems to be a disconnect between software designers and the retail experience, but this program bridges the data management needed to go with the point of sale functionality. Product management has been efficient. Customer service has been very helpful via telephone or chat and are always available which is nice. Even better, the amounts of time to need to contact customer service is minimal. After one year of use, I can say I use this program with confidence and I believe it packs the punch needed to handle scale.

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

Lightspeed has proven to be an extremely stable POS system for our usage. Downtime has been extremely minimal and Lightspeed support teams are always able to get us back up and running quickly--often before the operating hours of our stores. With the stability of the software and the advanced insights into sales trends, we are able to understand our merchandising and inventory needs at a much more granular level. This ensures that we aren't wasting dollars on excessive inventory that is difficult to sell. We are also able to focus on the operational aspects of the business since the software has been so stable and reliable for us.

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.

Great easy to use manage and maintain. Works on almost any tablet phone or cpu.

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.

Could have used a little more help importing our inventory but after I figured it out it was easy to do.

After making our first sales we were told we would have to wait 2 weeks to get our first deposit. We understood and gave them time even though that seemed like a very long time to wait for a startup. Unfortunately we never got out money. We were not informed anything was wrong and only when we realized we should have been paid by then did we call and ask what was wrong. We did the run-around with their support team for more than a week and STILL have not gotten paid. They are very bad at response time and when you sit on the phone you can't talk to anyone except a support member who knows nothing beyond how to help with the software. Good luck getting an email to anyone in the payments office or even have anyone in the office on a random Monday because it's a "holiday"? We had to threaten twice that we would be moving companies before we got any sort of reassurance we would be helped within the next day. We have had to close our shop for a week now losing sales and making our potential investors skeptical of our business because of Lightspeed's mess up.

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.

Customer service is worse than anything we have experienced with more than 20 years in running a business.

We have had a great experience with Lightspeed. It gives us the reports that we need to run the business efficiently. The waitstaff can easily take orders and payments without any problems.

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.

Lightspeed has been great to work with. The training provided after purchase was great. On going customer support has been phenomenal.

Really like the cloud based flexibility. Also love the syncing ability with most of my main vendors for importing purchase orders.

Only con is the fear of web being down or my local internet service not working and if that is the case not being able to run my store. This is has never been and actual issue though.

Overall it's been wonderful. Certainly has made my slow business growth possible.

Absolutely the BEST thing about Lightspeed is the quick access to knowledgeable support. Also, Lightspeed meets the needs of my business's work flow. The interface is clean and easy to navigate.

That a default option is not available for adding a drop ship address to PO.

More Accurate Inventory Many Sales Report Options Available/Analytics Ease of Doing Business Customer Friendly

This software is designed for RETAIL, makes doing business in our Realtor Store simple. Ringing up customer is a breeze. Easy and fast to create a purchase order and receive products to inventory. This software is intuitive and simple to learn. We keep track of our inventory and sales reports, with accuracy. Love the scanners and printed product label option.

The only negative is the long wait by phone, when we need to speak to support. Definitely worth the wait! All customer service people are polite. They always help us work through our issue with professionalism and follow-up email.

After investing in a competing product and being incredibly disapointed, we were faced with a tough decision; do we make the change to lightspeed only a month after investing $$$ that we did not get any value from? We decided to make the jump and were rewarded with the best upgrade our business has ever seen. This system is very easy to use. We have saved money and become more organized through efficient inventory management. Lightspeed has made our customers happy throughfast and organized checkout and allowed our staff to be the best they can be. Our service department has never been more organized. I feel like it has consolidated multiple areas of management and allowed more time to fucus on business. We re-invested for multi-years and could not ask for more from a POS.

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.

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

Excellent experience with Lightspeed, I would recommend this platform to any small or medium sized business.

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.

Terrible. I am leaving the system. I would never recommend this software to anyone!!!

I can change the background? There isn't much to love about this system.

THe fact that they told me they specialize in using the Ipad, but everytime I call with an issue or question, customer service is surprised im using an ipad. Also, customer charges and accounts are extremely confusing and difficult to use. You have to acces them through the "Manager mode" which is the least user friendly program I have ever encountered. The worst part is customer service. When I need to speak to someone I am on hold for at least 15 minutes. Then to speak to a manager is 24-48 hours for a call back, if they even call back at all.

We’ve been in business for 5 years now (and been in the small business world for another 15). Our experience with Lightspeed is single handedly the worst experience we have ever had with any vendor, rep, or supplier. And it’s not even close. I honestly don’t even know where to start. From the over promising and under delivering on the actual integration and battling back and forth for over a month on trying to get the setup right to deciding to break our contract based on all their broken promises and waiting over a month to have someone call and talk to me about what my cancel/return options were on our existing contract. I/we are the most mellow and chill people and company on the face of the planet and I have shaked with anger 3-4 times over this whole process. As I’m writing this I’m having the sales rep (who has promised me for 27 days that a manager would call to discuss my frustrations and give me options for officially canceling our contract) is emailing me and telling me to wait 1 more day. Which he has now said 5 days in a row. I just need to talk to someone besides him, a manager, a tier higher, anybody. I’m not even expecting to get a working resolution with who I talk to. I just can’t even start with the baseline of talking to someone other than my sales rep and at day 27, I’m tired of waiting. Thus this review.

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

Over promised Under delivered Zero communication

I would not recommend anyone, in any situation, use these features or services provided by Lightspeed. They are money hungry and nothing else.

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.

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.

I currently use both Lightspeed eCom & Retail (Omni-channel). This helps our retail store and online store stay synced and makes life easier for employees. Now, all POS sales and eCom sales are in one platform that is easy to use for our employees. If a customer purchases an item in our retail store, ecommerce inventory stays updated.

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.

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).

Over all, I have always liked to way the system has operated, The functions and the data inputting controls are easier than most other DMS systems that i have tried.

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.

BEFORE MY LIGHTSPEED RETAIL EXPERIENCE: I have been with Lightspeed Onsite (different program that is server based, not online based) since I believe 2013 and have been super impressed, referring their software to friends and other local business, literally like if I was a rep for light-speed. AFTER MY LIGHTSPEED RETAIL EXPERIENCE: I was scammed by Lightspeed Rep [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] Campanile who straight up told me YES, YES, YES. Then his manager [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] was not only rude, but completely unhelpful, difficult to get a hold of, very late to return calls, and would push me off to support, who then would just tell me they couldn't help me with the issues of Lightspeed Retail as the software wasn't programmed to accomplish what I needed. I had never experienced Lightspeed retail for myself, I was fed all these lies and misinformation from a slick salesperson [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], and now when lightspeed has confirmed that this Retail software will not work for my business, Im being held to a 3 year contract and a $4,850 loss. All of my questions, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] assured me lightspeed retail was the same software just better and more integrated, he told me I could continue to print my quotes with pictures as I was on Onsite (Not True) that they would have programming make the changes for me(Programming wasn' able to accomplish this, without me recoding the receipts for each and every receipt based on if it was to print pictures or not. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] misled me and lightspeed would not refund me or credit me towards onsite.

...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.

-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

I was hired as an IT pro to migrate a customer to Lightspeed. I have just under a decade in migrating large platforms and I have worked with numerous vendors over the years. Based on my experience, you can quickly assess which companies are "Sales Based" and possess no real infrastructure beyond the "Sale". These companies usually have very slick front-end websites, but fall very short when assisting paying customers to actually make use of the service. It is unfortunate that Lightspeed falls into this category. Lot's of promises up front, but obtaining capable support is not possible. Despite escalation and numerous phone calls and emails, not a single return contact was made within a week's time. To be sure, you can get a tier 1 person within usually a day, but they are untrained and are able to answer only simplistic questions. When a request for a supervisor is made or an escalation is requested, communications cease. Compounding this problem is the telephone "Firewall" they have erected around anyone empowered to address even the most basic of concerns. Over a week's time, I have been told supervisors are "Not Available" and will "Call Back" as soon as is possible. A weeks time to return a call to a paying customer is (far) more than sufficient time to allow. Unfortunately, once Lightspeed has your money, you as the customer are "SOL"! As a seasoned professional, it is my opinion that Lightspeed is a poorly run company and shows a troubling and dismissive attitude towards its paying customers. This "treatment" of its clients is well reflected in the reviews here. I am NOT a Lightspeed customer, as I am hired to work between the client and Lightspeed. As an IT professional, watching how this company treats its paying clientele has been disturbing.

Is very flexible, can be made pretty (if you can figure out the documentation), and does interface with other modules

The company, the company attitude, and the support it provides to paying customers. The experience during the "Sale" was filled with promises of support and help to move from a new account to a finished "Go-Live" product. Unfortunately, the Lightspeed platform is highly proprietary and therefore, success for most is dependent upon satisfactory support from the company. Here, they fall short of success and short of the promises made. When attempting to work with the company, they fall short again, lacking any of tier 2 or 3 technicians needed to satisfy anything more than a basic question. This leaves so many of the customers without any real ability to make use of what they were sold. This is a company predicated on "Sales", "Sales Pitches" and "Promises", but fails to deliver on what was promised and paid for.

We are a small retail store with three locations that does mostly local sales and some online sales. We manufacture some of our own products as well as re-sell other products. We also do a lot of large custom orders. We explained in detail to our sales person what kind of business we were and what our needs were for the system, including the type of work orders/invoices we needed to be able to format for our employees and customers. We were promised that all the forms and reports were totally customizable and it would be no problem. This is not the case at all! The work order forms and invoices can barely be customized and the only way you can customize it is if you know script or how to write in code. We've called customer support and they have offered no help on how we can customize it to fit our needs or even offer some outside resources that we would be glad to pay for. All we've gotten is "sorry, we can't help. if you want to request for this feature in the future, they may or may not add it." We were fully expecting and promised to be able to format our work orders and reports from the start, but now we can't every run our business out of this system. Total waste of money!

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

- 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

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.