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.

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.

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.