Lightspeed Retail Review
- Date Established
- 2005
- Location
- Canada
Pros
- Excellent register functionality
- Onboarding help provided
- Good work order management
- Robust reporting features
- Strong eCommerce platform
Cons
- Not cost effective
- Contract hard to cancel
Overview
Note: There are four separate Lightspeed POS products, though the distinction isn’t always clear. Lightspeed OnSite comprises software that is installed on your desktop Mac. Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud-based POS system used by food service businesses. Lightspeed eCommerce is used by online businesses and can be integrated with Lightspeed Retail. Finally Lightspeed Retail is a cloud-based POS system primarily used by those in retail businesses. This review looks at Lightspeed Retail.
Are you in the retail business? Looking for a cloud-based point of sale system that boasts diverse functionality and a plethora of features? If so, Lightspeed Retail is an option worth considering.
Developed in 2013, Lightspeed Retail is the cloud-based version of OnSite, Lightspeed’s locally-installed POS system. The product is currently used by more than 50,000 businesses. Lightspeed Retail is geared toward mid-sized and larger scale independent businesses and can handle the needs of virtually any retailer, boasting dozens of integrations that can keep your business on the cutting edge.
Lightspeed has rapidly updated in the past few years and now offers its own eCommerce platform, giving you the ability to set up and run your own store online. Its interface is highly intuitive and modern and customers will appreciate the level of customization that is available. Surprisingly, given the company’s attention to staying on the cutting edge of trends in the POS world, a few complaints have been lobbed Lightspeed’s way about its refusal to correct minor bugs in its software. Lightspeed is not the most cost-effective system on the market but it does offer pretty much any feature you could dream up and, for those looking for a one-stop-shopping system with strong customer service, Lightspeed is worth looking into.
Don’t have time to read an entire review? Take a look at our top-rated Point of Sale solutions for a few quick recommendations. Every option we present here offers excellent customer support, detailed user interfaces, and easy-to-use software, all for a reasonable price.
Table of Contents
- Pricing
- Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
- Specific Industry
- Specific Size Of Business
- Ease Of Use
- Hardware & Operating System Requirements
- Features
- Integrations & Add-Ons
- Compatible Credit Card Processors
- Customer Service & Technical Support
- Negative Reviews & Complaints
- Positive Reviews & Testimonials
- Final Verdict
Pricing
Lightspeed Retail has recently made slight changes to its pricing options. You can still get the most popular plan for $99 a month (with a year-long commitment) that comes with all of the basics. However, Lightspeed also encourages you to call for a quote to make sure you are getting all of the features you need. This appears to be a better system than before — previously, add-ons didn’t come cheap and could ratchet the overall cost of the system up quickly. Now there appears to be a little more wiggle room if you need things like eCommerce or advanced reporting, making a system that was on the pricier higher end of the POS spectrum slightly more cost-effective.
If you can afford it, Lightspeed can give you virtually anything you would need from a retail POS. Here’s what’s included in the basic package:
Basic
- $99/mo (billed annually)
- 1 register
- Access for up to 5 employees
- Omnichannel
- Personalized onboarding
- Free updates
- Secure cloud backup
- Basic reporting
- 24/7 support
Retail also has a 14-day trial you can use to check out the software for yourself.
Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
Though Lightspeed Retail is technically cloud-based—meaning your information is stored on Lightspeed’s servers and synced over the cloud to your platform—the system itself is a hybrid. Retail is browser-based; you don’t have to install any programs on your computer, but you do have the option to install the Retail POS app on your iOS device. In this case, the system offers most of the benefits of a locally-installed system without having to use bulky and expensive hardware or deal with on-site software updates.
Specific Industry
Lightspeed Retail is one of the most complete POS systems available for virtually any type of retail industry. It also offers features for selling services alongside physical products. With the ability to create estimates/quotes, service and repair orders, and define labor costs, the software is useful in a variety of settings. The POS really shines in the apparel industry but (especially if you have opted for one of the more advanced packages) can fill the needs of virtually any type of retail environment. One of the standout areas of this software is the amount of register functionality offered, something not readily available with similar POS system providers.
Note: If you’re a food seller, have a look at our Lightspeed Restaurant review; Retail won’t be suitable for your needs.
Specific Size Of Business
Any size business will likely work happily with Lightspeed Retail, though the target market seems to be medium-sized businesses or those that require custom elements and added flexibility. That said, the software is so feature-rich—with functions to support every part of the retail cycle, from ordering and purchasing to stocking and selling (as well as extensive CRM capabilities and employee management)—that it appeals to even the largest of big-box retailers.
Larger industries where cost may be less of an issue might gravitate to Lightspeed for its wide array of integrations and add-ons. Lightspeed also has a sleek design and regular updates, making it a relatively unique POS compared to some other options. If you’re looking for all of the standard features in a highly-rated POS —solid inventory management, deep analytics reporting, and marketing campaign management— along with the ability to highly customize the software and give customers a somewhat more intimate experience, this POS should be near the top of your list.
Ease Of Use
Lightspeed does a really good job of making sure customers understand what they are getting and know best how to use it. After signing up, an associate will contact you almost immediately to answer questions and help you hit the ground running. Once you’ve purchased Lightspeed, a customer success representative will help you set up your store and give you instructions about how to use the system. That being said, both the front- and backend of the software are extremely intuitive. The initial setup, completed in the in-browser software (though you can manage it from your POS), involves a step-by-step process which includes a catalog of items you can use to populate your inventory.
The organization of the management area is basic in the best possible way. All of the functions are grouped into categories on the left-hand side, and the most commonly used options are the most prominently displayed. This might seem like an obvious thing to do, but you’d be surprised how many POS dashboards hide away the most vital functions. You can start, continue, or refund a sale with reasonable ease, create special orders, and even set a customer display for when you’re away from the register.
There are very few areas where you could conceivably get tripped up when initially tooling around the interface. Everything is where you would expect to find it and navigating through screens is simple and easy to master with limited training. There’s a high degree of inventory customization, reporting options, and customer tracking, which inevitably lends a certain level of complexity to the software. Processing reporting, for example, is fairly complicated, with dozens of compiled reports to choose from. However, most POS backends are naturally a bit complicated and anyone with a modicum of managerial experience should be able to figure out the system quickly.
Hardware & Operating System Requirements
The Retail App and associated hardware will work with any 3rd generation (or above) iPad or iPhone, though bear in mind that you can’t make sales via iPhone; you must have an iPad. The in-browser option will obviously run on any computer with an Internet connection.
Lightspeed sells all peripheral hardware and offers two bundles:
- iPad POS Hardware Kit: Includes an APG cash drawer, a Vault Simplicity Base iPad stand, a Bluetooth socket scanner, a LAN receipt printer, and receipt paper. The actual iPad is not included.
- Desktop POS Hardware Kit: Includes an APG cash drawer, a Lightspeed scanner, a USB receipt printer, and receipt paper. The computer itself is not included.
Any of these peripherals can be purchased separately if you don’t need a whole bundle. For models and pricing, check out Lightspeed’s hardware page. Customer service representatives are trained to help you if a hardware catastrophe or minor glitch hits your store. Lightspeed sells Zebra label printers through its site along with APG cash drawers and barcode scanners that can be connected by Bluetooth or through a USB connection. Lightspeed also offers card-swipers for purchase through its website.
Features
- Multi-Tender Options: All payment types are accepted: cash, credit, debit, check, gift card, and store credit (either from exchanges or established house credit accounts). You can print and/or email receipts (and gift receipts) with product descriptions and notes. Gift certificates/cards also have a barcode for ease of use and can be reused (their balances can be changed). The option to apply discounts is readily available through the register, and you can hold and suspend sales and return to them later, or transfer them to another device. You can also place items on hold/layaway for customers to pick up at a later date. Adding new/existing customers to a sale directly through the POS interface is seamless. Performing returns and exchanges is equally easy.
- Inventory Management: The options for inventory management can go fairly deep depending on your particular needs. The basic process—adding descriptions, category management, and reorder points—is relatively simple. Amongst the more advanced features are customizable tags (so that you can essentially create your own inventory taxonomy for searching for items), multiple attribute matrices (large, black, leather, etc.), and the ability to assemble items into bundles, including serialized items. You can also manage items that are typically bought in bulk but sold individually (i.e. a 12-pack of soda that is sold by the can).
- Purchase Order Management: You can track vendors, complete PO’s across multiple vendors and items, and receive or return orders. Return to Vendor (RTV) is a new feature that allows you to manage merchandise returns due to damaged products, incorrect shipments, customer warranty returns, etc. Retail also allows you to track unit costs and shipping fees to accurately calculate your profits and margins. For selected vendors, there are more advanced options, such as direct catalog ordering from within Lightspeed.
- Employee Management: There is a basic time clock for employees, operated through an easy-to-set-up pin, as well as a log of employee sales and inventory changes. You can set up customizable roles from within the management area.
- Work Order Management: You can create work/repair orders, track repair progress, and print claim checks and service labels. The labor option also allows you to bill work orders based on time worked. You can schedule appointments for services and turn quotes/orders into invoices/sales too. Lightspeed recently added a feature that allows merchants to add up to 12 photos to a work order. This can be really helpful for jewelry or tattoo shops and especially for high-end repair shops that require before and after photos.
- Loyalty: The ability to add customers to your database is available on both desktop and iPad. You can track contact information, credit limits, and transactions. Other great features include the ability to set up different customer categories to offer specialized discounts, track outstanding balances and past-due accounts, track all your print statements, apply payments to invoices and balances, or use credits against future sales. Integrations with MailChimp and MailSync are now available for email marketing management.
- Reporting: There are hundreds of pre-set printable reports. Customized reports may be filtered by day, week, month, or year. View your profits by total revenue or margin to understand what your inventory is costing you and which items are most profitable. You can also use reports to track the effectiveness of promotions, strategically schedule and task your employees, and track end of day accounts, among other things. Advanced reporting includes responsive widgets that provide you with a visual dashboard of the most important elements in your store. There’s also a desktop browser export feature—any report lists can be exported to Excel in spreadsheet format.
- Multi-Store: Lightspeed allows you to transfer inventory between locations and provides full visibility of all inventory from stores and warehouses (you can look to see if another store has the product a customer wants). Another cool feature is the ability to set different prices for the same SKU on a store-by-store basis. You can take your show on the road with the Retail iPad app, capable of handling temporary storefronts like pop-up stands or trade shows.
- eCommerce: Lightspeed has added an impressive eCommerce platform with plans starting at $59 a month, adding another level of convenience for users. At the entry level price, users get 250 products, omnichannel capabilities, 24/7 support, personalized onboarding, and access to the app store. The service comes with SEO tools to help boost your store’s visibility online. There are also some nice marketing features, including the ability to integrate with Facebook and give customers the opportunity to leave product reviews on the site. Running custom marketing and promotional campaigns can be done directly through Lightspeed. The customization options are a big selling point — Lightspeed offers 60 themes and allows you to be creative with your design. It is an extra cost, but having this level of synchronization with your POS system is convenient.
Integrations & Add-Ons
Integration with MailChimp is included with any subscription to Lightspeed Retail; other third-party integrations are available as add-ons. Lightspeed integrates with a huge slate of companies and the chances are, if you’re interested in or have heard about a particular feature, Lightspeed will have it. The Add-Ons page lists several applications and services, including some of the following:
- Accounting: Lightspeed Retail offers a program called Lightspeed Accounting that is able to integrate with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks for Windows, and Xero.
- Loyalty Rewards: Retail integrates with a couple different CRM-related programs and services that allow you to create and track customer rewards programs, along with contact and sales data for email and online marketing purposes. These integrations include Loyal2, City Hive, Perkville, AppCard, Chronogolf, Tap Mango, PetStoreMarketer, and Thirdshelf.
- Scheduling: Use NimbleSchedule, Agendrix, Booxi, Chronogolf, or Homebase to schedule and track employee hours over the Internet, allowing employees to request time off, trade shifts, and clock in or out from anywhere.
- eCommerce: If you are currently using your own web store you can sync the data between Retail and your eCommerce platform using SkuIQ, Kosmos eSync, WooCommerce, Maurisource, Hyperspace, Accumula, and BikeExchange.
- Rental: For retailers needing to rent equipment, integrations with Rental Shop Manager and Bike Rental Manager are offered.
- Email Marketing: If you would like to take advantage of email marketing, Lightspeed Retail has you covered with Mailsync.
- Inventory Management: Your inventory management needs can be handled with any of the following integrations: Stitch Labs, iMerchandise, Nobal Technologies, and SkuVault.
- Lightspeed eCom: This eCommerce platform is an impressive addition to Lightspeed’s belt of POS systems. You can find out more information about this system by watching a demo or requesting a free trial. Not only is Lightspeed eCom a stand-alone, fully functional, exclusively online POS system, but it now offers integrations with Lightspeed Retail.
Compatible Credit Card Processors
Lightspeed Retail integrates with Vantiv Integrated Payments (Mercury), Cayan, and izettle.
As far as EMV compliance goes, Lightspeed was actually ahead of the curve as one of the few companies who integrated an EMV-certified terminal by the October 1st, 2015 deadline. You really can’t go wrong with Vantiv or Cayan, which makes it easier for merchants to shop around for the best rates.
Customer Service & Technical Support
Since Retail is priced with a subscription model, premium technical support is part of the service. Various kinds of support are available as follows:
- Phone support is available 24/7 (excluding holidays).
- There is a support page with links to resources, the status of the system, release notes, and training videos.
- You can also chat with a representative from virtually any page on the Lightspeed site from 11am-8pm EST or leave a message with your email address if no one is available.
- A community forum is available through the website and articles like “9 things to know before you buy a POS system” can be accessed on the main page.
- Lightspeed also has several social media pages including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
For users who have a valid subscription, Lightspeed customer support works to respond to service requests within one business day.
Negative Reviews & Complaints
When it comes to reviews, Lightspeed customers seem to be split down the middle. Though there are many positive reviews, several unsatisfied customers have negative things to say about Lightspeed Retail. Some of the most common complaints are as follows:
- Ignored Customer Requests: Various complaints cite that user feature requests and reports regarding system glitches have been largely ignored (over long periods of time, in several cases). Some customers state that they would like to see Lightspeed get better at maintaining and fixing its system before working on new functionality and advancement.
- Glitches: Several complaints have been made about bugs in the system. Those customers report being satisfied with responses from Lightspeed’s customer service regarding their complaints but are frustrated when no action seems to come from the developers.
- Feeling Stuck: A few customers have complained about being stuck in a contract they’re not happy with. (As with any system that requires you to sign a contract, you really want to make sure Lightspeed works for you and your business before signing your name on the line.)
- Learning Curve: A few reviewers found some of Lightspeed’s offerings to be a bit overwhelming and difficult to master. As mentioned, the backend (especially with advanced features) does take some getting used to simply because there’s a lot to try out. A few other reviews also mentioned that some of those advanced features occasionally lagged.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
Lightspeed Retail also has a loyal following of satisfied customers who have noted the following benefits:
- Customer Service: A large number of customers are completely satisfied with the level and quality of customer service they receive from Lightspeed Retail. From short wait times to very helpful and friendly representatives, many patrons are very content with the service.
- Ease Of Use: A common thread found throughout most positive comments involves how easy Lightspeed Retail is to use and train staff on.
- Strong Feature Set: Many appreciate the fact that Lightspeed Retail has a large and diverse set of features. Customers really like the unlimited and highly customizable inventory feature, as well as the matrix feature that allows you to organize items with multiple variations.
- Fast Set-Up: Many customers really appreciated the personalized set-up process and found that it was easy to train employees even with some of the more complicated aspects of the product.
- Integrations: A few customers, particularly ones who operate smaller businesses, loved the choices and the variety of integrations that were available to them.
Final Verdict
Lightspeed is one of the most robust and easy to use solutions in today’s POS market. If you’re looking for a system that will likely have every option you could dream up in a POS in both the front and back end and pricing isn’t a major consideration, Lightspeed should be fairly high on your list. I also appreciate the company’s commitment to offering customers the latest in POS advances with its constant updates. With strong customer service and a commitment to making sure that you get up and running quickly and smoothly, Lightspeed takes a lot of stress and guesswork off your plate.
I definitely recommend that you take Retail for a trial run and see what you think. There are more than enough satisfied Lightspeed Retail customers who would encourage you to do the same.
Matt Sherman
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454 Comments
Responses are not provided or commissioned by the vendor or bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the vendor or bank advertiser. It is not the vendor or bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
Organization Name: Arabella
The only downside is they dont have a payment plan so you have to pay upfront but as thier system goes, I haven’t found a better one.
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Mona,
We’re so glad to hear that you are enjoying Lightspeed! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any requests or suggestions for us as we continue to grow and refine our product. Always happy to hear from you, Mona.
Best,
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: Baltimore Bicycle Works
Alicia is the best person working there at lightspeed, wonderful customer service!
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Mer,
I’ve passed along your kind words to Alicia and she sends a heartfelt thanks. We’re glad to know you are enjoying you Lightspeed experience. Reach out if you need anything!
Best,
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: Douglas ridge rifle club
We at Douglas Ridge Rifle club use the lightspeed program a little different then other company’s. Our main goal here is to keep track of the many guns we own as well as to track all the ammunition we have use and supply to members and none members. Haveing the cost of these goods is a bonus. We have been using lightspeed for about a year now and we see many more benefits that it is giving to us. Seeing who is useing what equipment and ammunition and what months are busyer then others. We we’ll be expanding the use of lightspeed as time goose onBarry Mogus
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Barry,
Thank you for your valuable feedback! We love to hear how our product is supporting your growth. We’re glad that you are enjoying Lightspeed’s features. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have suggestions for us or need anything!
Best,
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: Veille sur toi
I am satisfied with Lightspeed POS and e-com!- Lightspeed is very user friendly- Perfect for omnichannel sales- Cloud-based software makes it easy and convenient- Great inventory management- Quick access to sales, inventory, customer information- Customer service has been prompt and when there are long wait times, you have the option to leave your number and receive a return call.The only thing I would say is that there are some features for the Ecommerce that would be nice, but can’t really call it a con since Lightspeed listens to its users and are welling to make the changes.I recommand this software, I feel that it will be adapted to my growing company.
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Karine,
Awesome! We’re so pleased that you’ve been enjoying the software and thorough service from our Support team. Our development teams are committed to growing our product with you in mind. If you have any feature requests, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: SHIFT Cyclery and Coffee Bar
Very happy with Lightspeed POS! We are a company of 14 and we use lightspeed as the backbone of our business.
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
We’re happy that you’re happy, Dan!
Kind regards to you and your team,
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: The Most Irresistible Shop in Hilo
I’ve been utilizing LS for my retail point of sale for two years. I chose it for their level of support and menu of services. It was a great choice for my business. My LS Account Manager and the on boarding team are great to work with, and do their best to help my small business. Mahalo Lightspeed!
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Tracie,
Our onboarding and support teams enjoy working with you too. Its our mission to support independent businesses like yours and we love to hear that you’re enjoying our systems.
Best,
Janina
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: Scripted Health®
We Tried Them All: Vend, Shopify, HikePOS, NCR SIlver, Square, BigCommerce, ShopKeep, etcAs a nonprofit it’s mandatory we are in compliance with General Accepted Accounting Principles. We have complex inventory logistics with different locations which made finding a good solution, difficult at the very least. Truthfully, if Lightspeed didn’t work we would have moved to a mainframe system. What’s difficult about the POS systems is that you don’t realize everything you need until you’ve invested so much time. It’s either their inventory management, how they integrate with your online platform, how well they integrate with other programs (despite how much they assure you) or how clueless their support. From the beginning, we drilled down with Lightspeed and even refused to sign a year commitment because we were skeptical. But having been with the program now several months you will not regret starting with LightSpeed first or if you’re looking for a better solution switching. Their support has a phone (which is rare) and is very well trained. The product really has excellent features that function as they are supposed to and the capacity to grow with you.
Organization Name: Pitbull Tobacco & More
Our two retail locations upgraded to Lightspeed about 8 months ago. The sales team is very knowledgeable and great at finding the best set-up and deal for what you need. We haven’t had any issues with getting and setting up our equipment. In fact, a recent call to tech support to help set up a new register at one location was pretty painless. While there are a few glitches in the system that we have encountered most have been small and there have been workarounds created to manage. Overall, what we are able to do with this software in terms of inventory management and reports, as well as streamlining our purchase orders and transfers has been nothing short of amazing. We are getting ready to expand to more locations before the end of the year and look forward to exploring what more Lightspeed can do for us as we continue to expand. I recommend doing the research for yourself and giving this system a try if it seems like a good fit for your business.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Ardmore Institute of Health
Great online POS! Can use anytime, anywhere, and from a variety of devices.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Walla Walla Clothing Co
All in all fairly helpful in creating reports I needed, however, wish he would have came to the table with valuable information that could be useful for my business. Would have been cool to see more examples of how analytics has helped other retailers.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Lightspeed POS
Hi Teresa,
Thank you for your valuable feedback. We are committed to growing our product with you in mind so never hesitate to reach out if you have any suggestions or requests. We are always glad to hear from you.
Best,
Janina Hojczyk
Customer Success Manager
Organization Name: Angela's Boutique
Lightspeed is the first POS system we’ve ever used and we’re very happy with our choice. The support staff has been very helpful along the way. We have both the Retail and Ecom systems and they are both very easy to use. It is very helpful having all the information you need in one place, whether it be inventory reports, product sales, daily sales or sales over a period of time. We have no regrets choosing lightspeed!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Bar Pamplemousse
Great software, have been using it for over 3 years now at multiple locations. love it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Yen Cuisine Japonaise
Overall, the software is great!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: FamilyLife
Being the POS Administrator for almost 10 years, I truly appreciate the ease of set-up and making the necessary changes. e.g. tax rates, shop names, various changes to inventory that the LightSpeed software affords me. I truly appreciate the reports available. The selection of the various report options has met all of our needs and more.I appreciate the timely manner in which LightSpeed notifies their customers of upcoming updates & issues. They communicate on the progress until the update is completed or the incident is resolved. Last but surely not least, I am very impressed with the excellence in the Customer Service assistance I have always received from LightSpeed. Whether the need is from our Account Executive, Billing Representative, Tech Support. . . they are always ready and willing to answer questions or assist in resolving an issue.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Vapor Loft KC
Wonderful POS for our Vape Shop, easy to navigate, make changes and great reports. We commonly recommend Lightspeed to other Vape Shop owners or potential owners. MikeVapor Loft KC
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Soccer Maxx
Tina was amazing. Super helpful and a pleasure to deal with.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: The Event Agency
It’s a great system, easy to use and staff friendly. Set up was quick and seamless.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: CDK KREATIVE KREATIONS, LLC
CHRISTINA WAS AWESOME, VERY PATIENT AND EXTREMELY HELPFUL….
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Voluptuary
Great customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Willow Green Gardens
I researched many POS system. Our inventory is quite different than most. We grow and sell shade trees and ornamental flowering trees as well carrying a complete line of shrubs.Finding a system that would track inventory and sales for us was top priority.I have most of the inventory in the system now. It is easy to navigate and it makes sense to this GiGi.I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off for the company, but I think we have it under control!All you young uns should be able to whip right through it!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Urbanity Boutique and Online
Lightspeed training sessions have been awesome! Especially Christina! She is trying to help me set up things in the system to save me time which is really above and beyond what I’ve expected. Although I am just beginning in the software setting up my inventory, I feel Lightspeed is going to be invaluable to my business. I’m excited to dive into the system further to see the power it holds.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Caruso Caruso
We have been extremely satisfied and impressed with Lightspeed since signing up for it two years ago. We love many things about Lightspeed, but above all, we love their willingness to continue pushing on new features, functionality, and integrations that make the user experience incredibly streamlined and constantly improving! Their customer service is awesome, we love how easy it is to communicate with someone. Lightspeed also has TONS of educational tutorials and new demos they are offering at your fingertips, making it so easy to have all of your questions answered and visually shown to you, on your time. The ecommerce interface is great as well. It really has allowed us to have the power of a large scale e-com retailer but for a small business. The ecommerce templates are impressive, and so easy for ANYONE to work with. Overall we have had such a great experience and would definitely recommend Lightspeed to anyone looking for a full-service inventory management and sales solution!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Ernies Tool & Specialty Co
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 which cost us about $50 per month so you are always connected.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: The Radical Edge
Excellent Product and great customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Barron's
Christina was excellent at answering my questions as well as using that information to springboard into other helpful tips. She was able to cover a lot of information in our time and made great use of our session. I feel more confident in navigating Lightspeed after her tutorial and would highly recommend her to other retailers!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: LED POINT
Lightspeed Retail is a very awesome product that I have ever seen. It has been only a month that I have signed up for this product, but so far it has been very good to me. The support hours are very good. The support team is very responsive and they understand your requirement and respond to you accordingly. If the question is unanswered they make sure that they find the correct answer and send you an email. So far I am very happy with the product. First I signed up for the Retail then I signed in for Lightspeed Accounting and recently signed up for my Ecom. I hope all will go well.
Thanks and Regards,
Raj.
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Organization Name: The Gypsy Wagon
We are in year 3 with Lightspeed. I shared my negative experiences with this company last year, and I still feel the same way. The product is great if you have 1 store, with limited skus, and do not need to link your website to your inventory (it has a ton of problems and bugs…we had to pull out of e-commerce, even though we had paid for it.) The Lightspeed sales staff is aggressive and convincing in selling their products. Last December we got a call from a Lightspeed salesperson saying they had developed an analytics program that solved all the problems of their regular program. We have 6 stores and the idea that we could better serve our business with improved access to our data sounded amazing. The cost was $8k. We talked it over, and decided that it would be worth it to use all the bells and whistles it promised. Lightspeed Analytics is a total scam. First, the training they offered was only an hour. It would take several hours to learn that system. After I taught myself how to use it…the system it does NOTHING special. We used it for 2 days before realizing the data is flawed, it’s extremely complicated to pull reports, and the information is pulls is not accurate. I see no value in a system that does not provide accurate information. We asked for a refund and were denied. I can’t wait for my contract to end. I have a book of problems with Lightspeed. Please feel free to contact me if you have multiple locations and a large number of skus (10k+)…so I can save you the headaches.
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Hello Carley,
Sorry to hear your frustrations with the light speed, I’ve been researching multiple omni channel combinations for my 2 retail business’ and have been so confused to which systems to use, i want to combine a retail POS with a Ecommerce website and be able to control inventories in real time. After doing my research it seems like most companies are pushing they’re affiliate sites and not giving true honest reviews. I am now thinking of paying a company a fee to give me honest advice to what combo is honestly right for me, i was thinking of Shopify and Lightspeed but now i am reconsidering due to the bad reviews and the monthly fees that add up in the end. If anyone else can give any advice that is non affiliated please do. Thanks
Organization Name: Alameda Bicycle
Lightspeed Analytics is a (lot) more complicated than a layperson (like myself) can handle. Super robust, and can be customized, but some serious Excel experience to make things work. Luckily, Joseph was an ace in support, and totally customized my reports to get me what I wanted. Big thumbs up to Joseph, now I look forward to actually begin using Analytics 😉
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I was so happy with Lightspeed about 2 years ago when I switched from The General Store for my first location. They were so helpful and walked me through getting my inventory uploaded and walking us through the system. My problems started this time last year when I signed up for their eCommerce. It’s terribly time consuming and they lack in the training department. You’ll be calling every day just trying to figure simple things out. The integration could be much better as it’s double the work to get items already in the POS to show online. I knew I was opening a second brick and mortar location so I specifically asked my sales rep if I could have both locations online and she said they were working on it. I then opened my second location and find out after now having 3 contracts (2 locations and ecomm) with them that I cannot have my new store inventory online and it’s not even something they’re working on! Now, I’m stuck with them and only half of my merchandise is online. Instagram shopping is the biggest thing to hit retail and they aren’t even working on that! They limit your success and growth and they don’t even apologize for it! Want detailed analytics, you’re gonna pay for it! The basic reports don’t cover much and forget about tracking customer activity as a whole. I have nothing but complaints right now as I’m out thousands of dollars and cannot grow my business as I would like to. DON’T SIGN UP WITH LIGHTSPEED!!
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Organization Name: Between Us Sisters, Inc.
We used QuickBooks POS for years and when it was time to upgrade we went with REVEL based on their recommendation, NOT a good choice. The system didn’t do many of the things that we had specifically asked for and was not a good transition for our retail shop. And so we began our research into a new POS system. We met with numerous vendors, asked tons of questions and finally had to bite the bullet and choose one. We picked LIghtspeed, and have not once regretted our decision. One of their biggest pluses is the help; there is a very easy to use help feature right on the site and if that doesn’t answer your question a person is available by chat or phone. Lightspeed really seems to care if their users are happy; they take our recommendations of upgrades or fixes to the systems and they are always there to assist us. We really feel like we have a partner!
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Organization Name: Podium Finish Sports Boutique
So decided to open the coolest concept in Downtown El Paso.A bike boutique cafe. So Podium Finish Sport Boutique & Cafe was born. Our first week we used spreadsheets ( dont ) Then we signed up for shopkeep. ( dont ) shop keep is a small point of sale that has no versatility. You cant even do a simple layaway or inhouse financing.During a trade show at Interbike I was definitely shopping for a POS. Talked to 3 providers and Lightspeed was not only knowledgeable and friendly but super affordable. The software is powerful and most importantly user friendly When I say powerful i mean it.We offer a wide range of athlete gear and supply, a full menu prepared by a chef, every style of coffee you can drink, 6 indoor virtual trainers, a fully stocked bike shop and mechanic and a bike fit studio.We run it all via lightspeed and we haven’t even started with e-com yet.We are very pleased with the program not to mention the fast customer service. Our IP address changed…one phone call and they jumped into my computer and fixed it fast.A+
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Organization Name: Rally Pointe
Lightspeed has allowed us the opportunity to work with a very user friendly POS and with staff turnover, there is very little training required. The backend reporting is very powerful.
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Organization Name: Go Safer Security
Easy, simple, and fun learning session.
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Two things I have run into with Lightspeed so far and we don’t go live for 6 days. First, There is a no refund policy. Second, it is optimized for Firefox, which the sales team doesn’t tell you until you buy, then the first problem comes into play.
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It’s basically a glorified cash register that allows you to use a scanner and look fancy while checking people out.They have many known bugs with the product that they are unwilling to fix. We have contacted them and on every occasion we get the run around about contacting the development team to address the issue or trying to solve it with some sort of work around. We don’t need work arounds for issues that should and do function on many other POS systems. Limited Hardware options that integrate and limited when choosing payment processors. Customer service is of no help. Say they will contact development team regarding your problem and nothing gets accomplished.
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Missing a core element of a POS that they refuse to fix while continuing to add new features. They need to focus on the core. Any retail environment that orders products by the case for any reason will be fed up with this system. The case item when broken down into singles do not communicate with each other for re-ordering. So if you set a level of singles say at 6 you would like the system to trigger an order of 1 case, it will not work. Huge inventory and ordering issues because of this. D- rating with BBB and not even accredited. Customer service can be ok if you hang up on them and keep calling until you get someone that is knowledgeable.
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Hi Chris,
We apologize for any inconvenience you’ve experienced thus far. Our 24/7 Support team would be happy to help you with a work around for this particular situation. You may reach them at 1-866-932-1801 Ext 2 at your earliest convenience.
We also encourage all our customers to visit our ideas page at ideas.lightspeedretail.com
Furthermore, our Customer Success team would be more than happy to address any other questions or concerns you may have. We can be reached at engage@lightspeedhq.com or 1-866-932-1801 Ext. 8000 then Option 2.
Thank you Chris and have a great day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Team
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We have been working with this system for 2 years now and we are very happy with it. Clear reports, easy to work with and efficient to be able to take orders at the table with an Ipad.Points of improvement:- It would be nice to be able to make a year-report- We would like to have a standard option to make notes with the order, now we have to make it a product- Sometimes it’s a bit slow- It doesn’t work on all internetbrowsers.These are points of improvement, but also without these we are very happy with this system.
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We purchased a copy of Lightspeed on site. After using the software for a few years we suddenly lost access to the program with an OS upgrade. We now have no option than to sign up for a $100/m contract to retrieve all our stock, customer and sales information from a program we purchased outright. RANSOM Money!
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This is one of the worst systems I have ever worked with. It seems to have some great features however they have many issues that change your data. We have also stopped payment on their “Contract” and now they are threatening to sue us. We have provided documents that show the same non-functioning issues since the start of the system yet demand we pay them. We have pulled it out of our 5 stores now and are so much better off. Stay away from this system as they will scam as much as they can from you.
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I’m newly onboard with Lightspeed, but I couldn’t be more pleased. Having had two previous POS systems over the past 12 years, I find this one to be so intuitive and easy to use. The training and support is excellent, the reports are great, it’s feature rich, everyone has been so helpful, and the pricing was very reasonable for such a powerful system.
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I love Lightspeed. It has made my life so much easier for my omnichannel business. I have access to great reporting, my inventory is integrated from my online shop to my retail shop, I can input the cost of each item (I didn’t have this ability with Shopify) and then see my margin, and it is easy to use overall.
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I like that the software is very easy to use and just works. One thing I really like about it is that when I’m putting in new inventory, it will search their database to see if the item has been inputted by someone else so that I don’t have to put in all of the information. It’s really neat. It will also search local inventory to make sure it hasn’t already been put in so you don’t have duplicates. One other thing I like about lightspeed retail is making sales. It’s just really easy to use, especially when you have a scanner. We use an iMac as our till and it just works really nicely.
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I do not recommend Light Speed for retail customers. We changed over to light speed at the end of last year and are still having major issues. Many of our issues have already been listed on this site but I think our biggest problem is when light speed updates its software and does not tell any one and does it during the work day. I can literally be checking out a customer and all of a sudden all our registers stop working. This is very frustrating as we are a busy store and often have lines of customers. We dont know why the registers stop working and when we finally get thru to light speed, after being on hold for 20-30 minutes, we are informed they did an update and we need to restart all our computers. This is so much fun when you have a line of customers waiting. Do major research when you look for a new POS system.
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Agree with these comments. We had it for more than eight years…. Nothing but problems the last couple of months. DON’T BUY THIS SERVICE … LOOK ELSEWHERE.
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I was first introduced to Lightspeed while working at my previous employer. The owner had bounced from program to program for inventory management/ POS and none of them fully delivered on every front. He learned about Lightspeed and decided to give it a try. Once it was activated, I was essentially told, “Here’s our new system…figure it out and let us know how it works.” Thankfully, I found Lightspeed to be incredibly easy to navigate. The user interface is straight- forward, there are countless articles and videos to help through any confusion, and live chat is also available if you still cannot find a solution to your problem. I spoke with customer support NUMEROUS times, and each time, I was given prompt, courteous, professional care that got me pointed in the right direction and back on task. This winter, I moved to a start-up company as their Director of Operations and specifically requested Lightspeed. I simply cannot imagine how much more difficult my job would be if we were using some other program. Whether it’s ordering, vendor returns, advanced reporting, or sales, I know that all of the tools and information I need are at my fingertips.
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The Bling Box switched to Lightspeed Retail and eCom Omnichannel on 10/1/16 after being with Quickbooks POS Basic 10 for 5 years and Big Commerce Web Platforms for 4 years. Of course, I was nervous about switching, but I knew our company had outgrown the capabilities of our current Point of Sale System and we were having too many mistakes with inventory trying to manually keep the counts straight with the online orders. I wanted software that would pull in my online sales and place them in my main database. Lightspeed does that. I wanted a fresh, new, high tech website and Lightspeed eCom had so many templates to choose from, so we went with a Visual Theme (Lots of large photo grids). I wanted to be able to access everything remotely anytime I wanted and Lightspeed does that. My wife and I entered thousands of dollars of jewelry from our hotel room in Dallas one night from a Dallas Market 3 Day Stay all remotely… using iPhones and access to our Lightspeed Account. We were selling the jewelry we just bought that day, from the hotel room, days before we even made it back to our store, because Lightspeed allowed us to do everything we would do in the store. It was Awesome! I wanted software that when we received shipments, we could put them in stock fast, upload a photo and make them live in the online store quick, then release the hyperlink to that item online with our facebook acount… Lightspeed does that! We exported and imported in about 5000 customers and over 12,000 inventory items when we switched over… Was everything perfect… No, of course not… if you go in to a switch like this with that kind of expectation… your expectations are not aligned with reality. They have great Retail and eCom Tech Support… and believe me, my wife and I called them a lot, and they were really helpful every single time. We are very good at what we do selling clothes, shoes and jewelry, but we have zero experience building websites, so we used their tech support a lot in the beginning because I didn’t have time to try and figure it out, I wanted assistance every step of the way and I got it! Their software is getting smarter by the day. They are always updating and releasing patches. I notice great changes weekly and it’s amazing to see what this software has done for our company already. Our online sales are easily 5 times higher using Lightspeed eCom Omnichannel compared to our last website which was just a stand alone site… it didn’t communicate with our inventory database at all, we had to do manual inventory adjustments all the time…. and that’s where mistakes were made. From other reviews I’ve read, Lightspeed has really improved over the years. I can understand the concerns from the past, but for our company, Lightspeed has been a blessing and we are very excited about expanding our Lightspeed Computers and Registers. We use an iMac and an iPad Register set up and it is Awesome! The Faster your internet and the Faster your computer… the Faster Lightspeed will be for you… ours is blazing fast. We have a brand new iMac and 100 meg internet,… so it takes about 1 second to do a Credit Card Transaction ( We use Cayan ) and we email out receipts like crazy! It is a perfect fit for our business model. I did about 6 months of research before making the switch, and yes, there were other companies offering very similar platforms… but something kept bringing me back to Lightspeed. I love that it runs on both Windows and Macs…. allowing me to buy fast macs and run my company the way I know it needs to run, super fast and efficient. They helped me set up my printer, label maker, bluetooth upc scanner, old school hard wired scanner and taught me how to ring up layaways and do deposits… you name it. Just keep in mind, this software is so packed with features, that it will take you time to get good at it… so don’t expect to be a Pro in the first month! Call Support and they will help you! Yes, they are busy, they are an expanding company… don’t you want to be one too! No company is perfect, including mine… so Lightspeed may have had rough times in the past, but we went live on 10/1/16 and have never looked back and continue to have record breaking months, over and over, even during our slow times because our online store picks up the slack from the retail store. Something else to consider… are you highly motivated to learn all the features and sync them up and push them out to Facebook and Instagram like we do? We do work hard, 7 days a week, but we love what we do and our company is growing for many reasons, and Lightspeed Retail + their eCom Omnichannel Package is a big part of that! Make this your best year yet! Jeremy RenaudThe Bling BoxOwner/CFO254-605-0909
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Really great POS system that is a vast improvement over our previous system. The ease of inventory management and the powerful reporting has made it a real advantage for me in running our hockey shop. Was easy to use and setup and the Lightspeed team was very helpful in transitioning over from our old system. Would highly recommend it.
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We have had a miserable experience with Lightspeed and will be switching to Shopify. Between paying for Lightspeed e-commerce for over a year WITHOUT KNOWING IT and our rep never informing us (simultaneously paying for and hosting our inventory on another site), extremely unhelpful customer service and training (the right people we need to talk to are currently on a retreat) and overall lack of continuity… we deeply regret choosing Lightspeed as our POS system for our brick & mortar business.
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I deeply regret subscribing to lightspeed. There are 2 acronyms for POS, (point of sale and Piece of $hit). Both apply to lightspeed. If you enjoy being on hold for customer support for long durations while you are trying to help customers, then Lightseed is your company to go with. The last 3 times I called for support, I waited 46, 24, and 54 minutes. The 24 is their best so far. Often the online chats are not helpful. They prefer to send you links to videos rather than actually help you solve the problem.
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You are correct in everything that you said. Scam artist. Promise you the world and you get nothing that works.
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I have been using Lightspeed Retail on a Mac desktop since 2015, and the interface works great! I have not experienced any of the problems in the reviews above, but those ones also appear to be several years old, so my guess is that all of those bugs have been resolved. I love the robust inventory management, and all of the different kinds of reports I can run to look at my sales from many different angles.Any issues I have ever had with Lightspeed (which were mostly in the initial set-up) have been solved in a timely manner (within an hour) by the knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly support staff. I love that they can screen share and set up my receipt and barcode printers for me without the frustration of figuring it out myself! Definitely saves me a headache.
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I have been very happy with my Lightspeed. I have all the reports I could ever need and when I have had any issues the support people have been super friendly and helpful. They totally get the small business owner! Thanks!
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Lightspeed is the ultimate POS system. I have loved it from the beginning and it continues to meet all of the needs I have for my Women’s Boutique. This was an excellent decision and has helped us build our business from day 1.
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We switched to Lightspeed for our 3 retail stores about two years ago. Shortly thereafter launched our eCom site as well. We are completely satisfied with the functionality and great customer support. Their first level support is very knowledgeable and solves most issues with one call.
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I’m genuinely surprised to see so many negative reviews here. I guess it’s another example of people only speaking up when they have something bad to say.. Lightspeed has directly led to me having more free time in my personal life. I have a tendency to live my business as I’m sure many do. The inventory management side of ligthspeed alone would be worth the cost of it. It has freed myself and my staff up to focus on things that will actually build our business such as marketing and customer interaction. Sure there are thing that can be improved but lightspeed has ALWAYS been more than available to help us better understand the software when we have had questions or issues.
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HORRIBLE! They will mislead you to get you into contract. They do not care about the business or business owner. Their customer service is Horrible. They would rather argue with you than help you and never call back when they say they will. I have been with them for 3 years and would love to get out but they have me locked in for another year and they wont budge. THERE IS NOW WAY TO STOP YOUR EMPLOYEES FROM DOWNLOADING YOUR ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE AND INVENTORY INCLUDING COSTS,PROFITS, AND MARGINS. Try it. Log in as an employee and click export in the items screen or the customer screen. In two clicks they have your entire business. Managers can not build,send or check in purchase orders without seeing all costs and profits. Unless you plan to always be in store and never have employees alone in the store DO NOT GO WITH LIGHTSPEED. They dont care and will just keep coming out with new items to charge for that should just be ongoing upgrades to their core system such as the new analytics. They have came out with over 4 new items to charge for while not fixing the issue they knew about for over two years.
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We have been using Lightspeed for over a year in two different stores and are very please with it. Phone client support combined with online help are excellent. Numerous training video are a bonus.Very open to suggestions, this is a company I can easily grow with. I highly recommend it.
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Easy to learn. Easy to move around from task to task. Good reporting.
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My Lightspeed support person answered every query quickly and precisely and suggested alternate methods as well. She sensed immediately my level of understanding the software and knew the proper pace and terminology to make it fast and easily comprehended. I rarely have needed support over the years. I am completely happy with Lightspeed and would recommend it to anyone that asks.
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I’ve been using Lightspeed Cloud for coming up on 2 years now and I think it’s GREAT! It’s easy to use, very intuitive, has great reporting and the customer service has been great. I really recommend it.
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Lightspeed is one of the best POS systems ever. First of all cloud based allows you to access your database anywhere, anytime.
You can maneuver easily through all aspects of the system, produce reports of all kinds .
If we have a power outage, we can still ring up sales by using a wireless hotspot on our phones, simply amazing.
WE LOVE IT AT TERRY’S PET STOP
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We’ve been using Lightspeed now since the launch of our shop in 2011 and couldn’t be happier. And now with the switch from OnSite to the Cloud, the POS is even better (though a bit boring to look at now). Ease of use and access to all required catalogues makes ordering and inventory management a breeze on top of all the great reporting features. Support, when needed – which is not often – is prompt, polite and very helpful. Nothing but a pleasure to use and deal with.Cheers
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all i can say IT works it is fast, and i don’t half to think about it i spend my time on other things. setup was simple and every day i boot up my computer and there it is ready to work for me
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This POS has come a long way. By looking at the reviews from several years ago, I would not buy it. However, today LightSpeed is a fantastic POS system. It is stable with very little (almost none) downtime. It is beautifully designed and very intuitively laid out. Training new staff, is a breeze. When the need arises to contact support, hold times range from a minute to six or seven until we have an extremely polite support person on the other end. The ROI for us is very high. I am grateful for the transparency of feature roll-outs, bug-fixes and support cases. The communication between LightSpeed and our company is very good. We also use LightSpeed eCom and it is a very well thought out and useful ecommerce system. We particularly enjoy how it integrates with LightSpeed Retail. LightSpeed is not perfect and there are a few items I like to see changed (hello, negative on-hands), but it is very close.
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Investing in Lightspeed POS is hands down the worst decision I have made in 10 years of business. The problems in the system have cost me quadruple in time and money than what our previous system cost. When we were ready to launch our website, the eCom site had a glitch and we couldn’t add product for 2 months. We called almost daily for updates and information and received no communication to what the problem was or how it was being handled. That issue alone cost me tens of thousands of dollars. And they could not have cared less. Getting anyone to even talk to us about it was a nightmare on its own. TWO MONTHS our site was not functioning. I would give my right arm to get out of my LIghtspeed contract. That has not even been the worst thing. Everything I have called and asked for, I mean EVERYTHING, has been answered with a no. “Can you export sales with the item name and vendor on the same report?” No. “Can I age my inventory so I know how long it’s been on the floor?” No. ” Can I export my vendor list with their contact information? ” No. Today I called a department called Customer Success to see if someone could help me be “successful” with an export I needed. What a huge joke. The gal literally told me I needed to call tech support to complain again because one complaint wasn’t going to make anything happen. What?!?! I 400% know that the people there do not care at all that they have sold us a crap system. The “issues” board is an absolute laugh…. there are legitimate shortcomings of this system that would be so easy to fix and they don’t do it. I invite any LIghtspeed developer to my office and spend time with me so that they can see the intricate work- arounds I have had to develop to use their system. I would LOVE for them to watch me run their Master Order feature. It takes me 3 days to run the restock report. They would want to shoot themselves after experiencing what I have to go through. Then I would show them how a retail store needs to analyze their business and how the reports in Lightspeed make it impossible. We have to manually create all of the reports we use, Lightspeed’s advanced reporting system (that you have to pay extra for!) all are missing critical factors. We even designed a Filemaker purchase order program to track our orders, a step that we do IN ADDITION to entering them into Lightspeed, because the info Lightspeed PO system provides is worthless. I have been using Lightspeed for 8 months. We had to hire an extra person just to deal with the extra work required to utilize the system’s features. If you have 1 location, limited vendors, and limited skus, Lightspeed may not be that bad for you. But if your business is more complicated than than, I do not recommend this system to you. In fact, please, for your own sanity and well being, stay very far away from Lightspeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am starting season 2 with LS Retail Cloud based. The product is just OK. It requires a great deal of manual input and “work arounds” to get what you want. A VERY inflexible system. Customer service in the past year has gotten worse. Hold times are very long and you can literally get a different answer from every person you “chat” with. Negative inventory is a HUGE issue for anyone that runs a retail business and I feel it should be a HUGE priority. It has been mentioned here many times and is still not fixed, so sadly I must conclude, as many others have, that light speed really does not care what their customers want or need to do business. I am sure at least ONE programmer could have figured this issue out in the last 3 or 4 years???? They are definitely WAY understaffed as the hold times are upwards of 30 minutes most days and improvements and changes seem nonexistent. Hindsight…I would not choose LS again. Luckily, I happen to be solid with my computer knowledge and I learn rather quickly, but the average sales manager without that ability would be horrified at the amount of manual work required. 2 seasons in and my inventory is still not 100% accurate (mainly due to the “negatives” issue) and my website is still incomplete. Every photo and description on every item is a manual process requiring upwards of 10 steps or more per item. TEDIOUS!!!Reports I need are not available in the formats I need, and once again with the “work around” as a solution. It seems that developers spend all of their time creating “work arounds” to the broken system instead of actually fixing the problems. The ideas forum seems to be a complete joke, and as you can see here, many posts from 2015 were responded to, not so much any more unless you leave a glowing review. The negatives seem to be ignored on here as much as they are in the forums and with technical support. Everything is “in process, in development or in the works” but nothing actually happens that I have witnessed.The web site is difficult to work with. You cannot sort your product by category or by vendor (how ABSURD) which makes doing updates or changes very time consuming and difficult. Almost everything is a very complex process for anyone with any other tasks at hand, and above average computer skills are required to avoid a total waste of time, money and effort to get your website up and running.I have found no simple way to do “sales/price changes.” If I want to mark down all my toys, for example, I can’t select the category and take 10% off for the weekend. If I want to have a sale on t-shirts, I can’t set -$5.00 for today or a BOGO sale on books for next Tuesday. Everything is a manual process which takes so much time that you can’t even begin make money off of your sale events. Other issues as noted before me are so very iimportant, yet completely ignored by LS support and development. Overall:I have made it work for me to the best of my ability, but have spent months (12+) to get this far and still have months to go. It is NOT really user friendly to set up. It is fairly easy use for your staff, but behind the scenes its overly complicated and time consuming to manage with very little flexibility.Customer support is lacking. They are nice and they try on the front line to excuse the behind the scenes staff who seem to get nothing done, nothing changed, nothing updated, fixed or debugged. They are grossly understaffed for the volume of work they have and the amount of calls they get (a direct correlation with the vast number of issues that LS still has.)It is an upgrade from what I have but again, I would probably not choose it again if i was starting all over. I like many aspects but dislike almost as many so I have very mixed feelings depending on how LS is working that day and what I am trying to accomplish. Do your homework and know that this is not as easy or flexible as LS claims it is. I would definitely NOT sign up for more than 1 year in the beginning so you don’t end up stuck with them when you finally realize it might not be the best option for your particular business. I like many others have invested to much time and money to turn back now.
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I choose Lightspeed Retail POS as the core of our back office application. After evaluating other POS applications it became very apparent that Lightspeed provided the quality and integration capabilities necessary to support our business as we grow from one store to multiple stores. From support to price to training our experience has been excellent each time we have integrated additional modules supported by the Lightspeed platform. As the owner of Pedego electric bicycles in Naples Fl. I was able to concentrate on growing my business with the support of a great back office application from Lightspeed.
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I’ve been using Lightspeed POS for my pet food store for about a year and a half now. I am very pleased both with the product and with the speed and ease of customer service on the few times a problem has come up. The integration was virtually seamless as all of my major distributor catalogs were all ready in the cloud. While a few pricing and cost updates were necessary, it took a few hours to have my entire inventory in the system ready to sell. Customer service is generally fast, patient with my request or problem and courteous…and they all speak fluent English so there have zero communication breakdowns. I love that I can live check my numbers, inventory and staff hours all from my phone, tablet or pc at home. Tracking sales, margins, and trends in my store is extremely easy thanks to Lightspeed POS. euPAWria Holistic Pet Center couldn’t run this efficiently without Lightspeed POS.
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Lightspeed has been great to work with. Their software is easy to use / understand and everyone I’ve dealt with has been great. I’m stoked they have an API, too. I have automated my reporting and updates with it. Great company, fantastic product. I’d highly recommend it.
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I own a small retail shop and utilize LightSpeed Retail and LightSpeed eCom. I moved from Checkout for Mac to LightSpeed when my needs required more accurate reporting and a more thorough online presence. While I felt a little pushed during initial email/phone contact, the information was complete and to the point. I had absolutely no problems with the transfer of data over and the ease in setting up new products is seamless, once the concept is explained. Their technical support team is wonderful and has always resolved any of my issues right away. I love the ease in use of the checkout. I have several seasonal employees and assuming they remember their passwords, can jump right back in where they left off, no retraining needed. My husband loves the incredible detail of the reports and the import into Quickbooks works just fine. eCom is a huge improvement over the old ‘webstore’ product. I set this up on my own also…just spending time in the product will take you far, then schedule your onboard training. That way you already have questions in mind and they can review what you have established. We have over 8000 sku’s, LightSpeed handles it seamlessly. In the event of an minor outage, the IT team jumps to fix the issue promptly. I also added Cayan payment processing and their Genius terminal. No more double entry and payments are accurately reported. I love that this terminal communicates with the program without the use and expense of a payment bridge. They also reduce my monthly processing charges. I haven’t once regretted coming onboard. LOVE IT!!!Erin, OwnerCowboy Town Western Outfitters
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I own Homespun, a boutique in Indianapolis that primarily sells the handmade goods of artists and makers from across the U.S. We largely work on consignment with our artists and have struggled to find a POS system that provides the right combination of reporting functions and inventory options to ease the cumbersome nature of the consignment model, particularly the month-to-month payouts after product sales have been made. We have been in business for almost seven years now and have been using another Mac desktop-based software that entire time. The former system served its purpose for the duration well enough, but we’ve expanded the shop square footage, increased inventory significantly, added more employees and are planning to add a web store very soon. It was time to upgrade. So, we switched to the Lightspeed online POS for retail and it has been AMAZING. The customer service alone is worth the change. We’ve had a few small hitches here and there in getting the inventory migrated to the new system and some of the hardware components set up, but the customer service is available 24/7 and is so friendly, patient, thorough, and knowledgeable. The customer service with our last system was more or less nonexistent, so this is a very welcome change. In addition to the great customer service, all of the reporting features I need are there, which is making running a large consignment business much easier. We are very happy with Lightspeed.
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Lightspeed is great when it works. There was a major outage about a month ago that lasted a few hours. It costed ame a bit of revenue and the representative blamed amazon servers and would now compensate me for my losses. That left a bad taste in mouth and I’m not in contract.
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Opened a bicycle shop in March of 2015. No prior retail experience, avid cyclist. A venture with my son. For 2015 we did not have a POS system. Signed up with Lightspeed in Nov/Dec 2015 and had the system up and running by January 2016. The phone support has been outstanding … sometimes long wait times for the next available agent (solution, get up early and call at 5:00am or call late at night—they are truly 24/7) BUT the agent’s are knowledgeable and helpful, have found that they will take the time to work through whatever questions we have — they are not on some turn around clock where they have to get you off the phone. This is a Canadian company based out of Montreal … I have never experienced any English language issues and that is a major plus.
I am unable to say that Lightspeed has a better program than other POS providers–in the retail bicycle world Trek offers a system that is very, very expensive by comparison. The benefits of a POS system make the day to day operation of our shop go much more smoothly. I sometimes wonder how retailers managed prior to when the wizards of smart created the bar code scanner and the computer software to run these systems.
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Thank goodness for Lightspeed! As a small business owner I absolutely love how Lightspeed seems to be programmed perfectly for almost any business and yet I feel its programmed just for my stores specific needs. The customer service is great! At anytime I can call, chat or email and someone is right there ready to help! I highly recommend Lightspeed to anyone or any business that wants an easy to use and fast system!
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Guys, signing up with Lightspeed with a 2 year contract was THE WORST DECISION EVER! For you sakes, do not use their platforms. I did a lot of research between Shopify and Lightspeed and ultimately went with Lightspeed because they had European offices (I’m based in Europe). Their statistics that show how much money your ecommerce site makes is TOTALLY INACCURATE! The function DOES NOT WORK! They have been trying to fix it for 6 months now and I still have to pay for external programs to get my proper accounting. And the use a compression on their sites to make them faster but it affects the quality of pictures on my site! Can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to workaround these 2 massive issues. PLEASE LEARN MY MISTAKE AND GO WITH SHOPIFY! I WISH I DID
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Lightspeed is an extremely easy system to use. Many screens are intuitive making it quick to learn and easy to teach others. Whenever an issue arises the support team is there to assist and resolves quickly.
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Lightspeed is the best there is when it comes to POS systems! What set’s them apart is their customer service and the amount they invest in the relationship they form with businesses that utilize their resources. Everything is intuitive but anytime we have questions, they are always available for us. When we changed POS systems it cut our POS training down from 2 hours, to 20 minutes – that is just how clear it is and their training resources are incredible! I not only use them for my own business which is a retail adventure outfitter, but I also recommend Lightspeed to my clients who I consult with for their POS needs.
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The Bling Box switched to Lightspeed Retail and eCom Omnichannel on 10/1/16 after being with Quickbooks POS Basic 10 for 5 years and Big Commerce Web Platforms for 4 years. Of course, I was nervous about switching, but I knew our company had outgrown the capabilities of our current Point of Sale System and we were having too many mistakes with inventory trying to manually keep the counts straight with the online orders. I wanted software that would pull in my online sales and place them in my main database. Lightspeed does that. I wanted a fresh, new, high tech website and Lightspeed eCom had so many templates to choose from, so we went with a Visual Theme (Lots of large photo grids). I wanted to be able to access everything remotely anytime I wanted and Lightspeed does that. My wife and I entered thousands of dollars of jewelry from our hotel room in Dallas one night from a Dallas Market 3 Day Stay all remotely… using iPhones and access to our Lightspeed Account. We were selling the jewelry we just bought that day, from the hotel room, days before we even made it back to our store, because Lightspeed allowed us to do everything we would do in the store. It was Awesome! I wanted software that when we received shipments, we could put them in stock fast, upload a photo and make them live in the online store quick, then release the hyperlink to that item online with our facebook acount… Lightspeed does that! We exported and imported in about 5000 customers and over 12,000 inventory items when we switched over… Was everything perfect… No, of course not… if you go in to a switch like this with that kind of expectation… your expectations are not aligned with reality. They have great Retail and eCom Tech Support… and believe me, my wife and I called them a lot, and they were really helpful every single time. We are very good at what we do selling clothes, shoes and jewelry, but we have zero experience building websites, so we used their tech support a lot in the beginning because I didn’t have time to try and figure it out, I wanted assistance every step of the way and I got it! Their software is getting smarter by the day. They are always updating and releasing patches. I notice great changes weekly and it’s amazing to see what this software has done for our company already. Our online sales are easily 5 times higher using Lightspeed eCom Omnichannel compared to our last website which was just a stand alone site… it didn’t communicate with our inventory database at all, we had to do manual inventory adjustments all the time…. and that’s where mistakes were made. From other reviews I’ve read, Lightspeed has really improved over the years. I can understand the concerns from the past, but for our company, Lightspeed has been a blessing and we are very excited about expanding our Lightspeed Computers and Registers. We use an iMac and an iPad Register set up and it is Awesome! The Faster your internet and the Faster your computer… the Faster Lightspeed will be for you… ours is blazing fast. We have a brand new iMac and 100 meg internet,… so it takes about 1 second to do a Credit Card Transaction ( We use Cayan ) and we email out receipts like crazy! It is a perfect fit for our business model. I did about 6 months of research before making the switch, and yes, there were other companies offering very similar platforms… but something kept bringing me back to Lightspeed. I love that it runs on both Windows and Macs…. allowing me to buy fast macs and run my company the way I know it needs to run, super fast and efficient. They helped me set up my printer, label maker, bluetooth upc scanner, old school hard wired scanner and taught me how to ring up layaways and do deposits… you name it. Just keep in mind, this software is so packed with features, that it will take you time to get good at it… so don’t expect to be a Pro in the first month! Call Support and they will help you! Yes, they are busy, they are an expanding company… don’t you want to be one too! No company is perfect, including mine… so Lightspeed may have had rough times in the past, but we went live on 10/1/16 and have never looked back and continue to have record breaking months, over and over, even during our slow times because our online store picks up the slack from the retail store. Something else to consider… are you highly motivated to learn all the features and sync them up and push them out to Facebook and Instagram like we do? We do work hard, 7 days a week, but we love what we do and our company is growing for many reasons, and Lightspeed Retail + their eCom Omnichannel Package is a big part of that! Make this your best year yet! Jeremy RenaudThe Bling BoxOwner/CFO254-605-0909
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When I ordered a POS, I thought they meant point of sale, not Piece of $#@T.I was led to beieve I could enter my inventory in a matter of a few weeks even though I didnt have an existing POS to switch from. This was a load of crap. The sales person knew I was having surgery in a month and signed me up and started billing me right away. Meanwhile 3 months later, Im finally back at work and trying to enter items. They have videos for most things, but you have to find them first, then if you have a question, you can wait 20 minutes to get support. I cant wait for a situation where my system is down and I have a liin of customers waiting while Im on hold ofr 20 minutes. When I agreed to this system, I was told hold times are only a couple of minutes. Total bullshit.
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We opened up our pet store in March 2016 and had to choose a POS that was easy and quick to setup and even easier to learn. We decided to go with Lightspeed Retail after learning about the various POS features (you can actually run the POS on iPads) and knowing that their support was available 24 hours 7 days a week. We loved the fact that we emailed them our inventory and they were able to upload it for us, just imagine trying to enter over 5000 SKUs !!! Even more impressive was their product matrix feature, what a life saver.What we found really impressive was their reporting (which I could run from home). We could not only run reports on product sales but as well as employee performance. There’s even a mobile app where I can easily view my stores current sales. We have been running Lightspeed Retail for close to a year now and haven’t looked back, highly recommended !!HarminCoco & Dex
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Our SPCA gift shop went from an old fashioned cash register to Lightspeed last Spring. I was very pleased with their set up assistance, and the ease of use. It is much easier to teach to my volunteers than our old system, and gives me so much information about my store operations. I learn something new every day!
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Have been using what is now called Lightspeed Onsite for 4 years. Would definitely not recommend. So many bugs, some major, which they are slow to resolve or never fix at all. Tier one customer service not very knowledgable Often very laggy especially when major revisions are made or when accessed remotely. They spend a lot of money on marketing but not much on product development. Buy something else. Buy anything else.
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Light speed needs to hire an account to supervise the programmers so consistent standards and proper definitions could be used throughout the program.While the interfaces look slick many of the reports do not work or give garbled data.Most annoying to me is that invoices do not calculate fractions of cents and every single invoice must be adjusted. This throws off the cost of good sold and REALLY? It’s basic arithmetic. It’s like light speed follows common core math principles. As a business owner, that is not precise enough for me.
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We have using Lightspeed Retail POS for 18mos and it has been a great experience for our retail store. Moving into the digital age was a daunting move but worth the effort as we know we had to have a better grip on our inventory, customer & sales data. In my opinion it is easy to use and easy to teach to staff will virtually no computer experience. Anytime we have questions the customer service staff have been very responsive and always ensures our issues are resolved. In my experience they are pleasant to deal with and I feel they genuinely want to ensure your questions/issues are resolved. Initially I shopped around but other stores around me that were going this route had started with LS and were happy. There will always be little issues but overall it’s what we signed up for. The biggest feature I like is all the information is in cloud and I can access it from anywhere from any device. It has been good for us and I would recommend them without hesitation.
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I love it. I had Christina Howison do my demo and she was amazing! So kinds and knowledgable.
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Where to begin…. Lightspeed is hands down the best cloud-based POS software around. USE: To begin, it’s all in the name! Lightspeed is a FAST point of sale platform. We’re able to search through tens of thousands of customers / products instantly. The user interface is VERY intuitive and set-up / maintenance is effortless. INVENTORY: If your business sells items with variants (such as size or nicotine strength), Lightspeed has INCREDIBLE matrix capabilities. Easy to use, edit, and maintain. The platform has outstanding product history including sales, purchase orders, transfers, and manual adjustments. Our shrinkage has almost disappeared! We’re on top of our inventory like never before.REPORTS: If I’m being honest, I would have to say that Lightspeed has almost too many reports. However, they are all very detailed and easy to use / reference to! MULTIPLE LOCATION: My FAVORITE part! We have two B&M locations. Lightspeed KILLS the multiple location game! Check inventory from both locations at once. Create store-to-store transfers. Utilize Lightspeed’s time clock feature and export labor reports for each location individually or for both combined! Switching between locations is two clicks away. Most financial and inventory reports have options to populate all or one location data. Lightspeed also allows multiple registers per location!OVERALL: After using nearly every major POS system on the market, I’m confident in saying Lightspeed is the best. They are second to none. Forget Shopify, Square, NCR, Bindo, etc. Lightspeed is the best solution!
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I have mixed feelings about Lightspeed. We have been on the cloud base system for a little over 6 months. On the one hand, many functions are pretty easy to use and even quite innovative. For instance loading new products is so fast and easy there is no reason to consider an import file. Then, on the other hand some functions that ought to be basic just cause you to go “huh?”. For instance, there is a beautifully laid out payment screen to receive payments during a sale, but, to book a prepayment or take a deposit, you can’t use it. Instead, there is a very clunky process off to the left side of the screen that must be used. The biggest “gotchas” are these:- If your customers have company names, Lightspeed is not the right product for you. We will likely leave the product once our contract is up for this reason alone. Although, there is a space in the customer file to enter the company name, it is not utilized very many places. It does not appear on any reports, not even on the customer statements. It does not appear on the screen while booking a sale. Searches on words within the company name will frequently fail to find the customer. We have to remember the names of the contact person, but, many companies have multiple contact persons, so, we are often standing in front of the customer trying search after search looking for their company so that we can book their sale.- If you use the full PO, inventory system heavily, you might be disappointed like we are. Especially, if you like to provide product to customers fast when it arrives. (1) Be forwarned, your inventory balances will never be correct. Lightspeed thinks the best way to keep inventory is to never let the quantity on hand go below zero. So, if an item is sold with no inventory on hand, an automated adjustment will be put in to create the inventory and then sell it. The problem is, if you sell an item before the PO receiving process was completed, the system auto incremented your inventory. Then, of course, when you receive the PO, the inventory gets added again. The only way to recover is to make a manual adjustment to bring it back down. You don’t always know that you need to do it, but, you would if the inventory were allowed to go negative. If the inventory were allowed to go negative, then, receiving the PO would resolve it by way of natural process. It gets even worse if you have a kit (or assembly). If you sell that assembly without having stock on hand, the system auto increments it. However, it does not auto decrement the components that made up that assembly, so their on hand quantity is too high. You can go on selling assemblies without your inventory ever going down because the end product auto incrementing and the components balance never changes. A negative balance in the assembly would alert you that you forgot to build the kits. But, now, you cannot go back and register the builds because that will add more inventory to your final assembly (inventory that you already sold). Again, the only way to recover is a manual inventory adjustment. (2) The process for taking an inventory count is awful. There is no quick way to get a list of items that have not been cycle counted for awhile and even when you do, there is no quick way to enter the cycle counts. The process is so clumsy and tedious. (3) The system will not remember costs from multiple vendors. You might source the product from multiple vendors, but, it will only remember the cost of the primary vendor. (4) The system cannot tell what box size to buy your inventory. Most of our vendors sell their items individually, but, require us to purchase them by the case. We can’t remember the case quantity on every item when we go to write up a PO and the system cannot tell us. We use a significantly elongated process of having duplicate items described as a case and purchase those. We confuse our vendors because we have to state our PO in case quantities rather than in the individual units that they sell in.In summary, the system is pretty easy to setup and use for most things, but, there are some major things that are problematic. When attempting to address these issues with customer service, I am frequently referred to the “Ideas” page where we can log our ideas and vote on each others ideas and supposedly influence Lightspeed to create upgrades for the most popular ideas. The problem is, there are so many thousands of ideas that the votes are so dilluted that none of them appear important. In fact, these issues discussed in this review have been expressed and voted on and reexpressed and revoted on for years with no apparent interest in fixing them. As a result, their ideas page is completely worthless.Anyway, if I had it to do over again, I would look harder for another product.
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This is an excellent review and sums up many of the issues with lightspeed. This review is the one lightspeed needs to take and address as it covers what I believe the most people have issues with.
I would also add the ability to do custom reports to this review. Even with Advanced reporting you don’t get the ability to have the reports you need with the exact information in those reports you want.
I for one would like to see Lightspeed have two teams. One team would be to advance the product and design new functionality and the second team would only stick to fixing issues current with the system. I feel that sometimes Lightspeed just wants the cool job of adding new functionality and changing the system but has little interest in fixing items the working system as it is.
I have worked in IT for many years and I know sometimes promotions, more money and any moving up in a company comes with developing and not with just fixing or maintaining systems. If this is the case with Lightspeed My Hope Is that management reevaluates how strongly their customers believe in the system they have and need to fix it as it is and put more emphasis on that than developing the system further.
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STAY AWAY…. We have had this system for a year and it is a nightmare, months of setup time wasted. Dont even know where to begin theres so many issues or as someone else mentioned Shortcomings! 1.No negative inventory 2. if you add a discount % on the PO it mis calculates it. must manually correct yourself3. In Ecomm you can not show photos for more than 12 variants4. No decimal of inventory 5. No decimal for sales, (cant sell .5)6. Ecomm categories only 3 deep7.No marketing email must pay 3rd party8. Assembled items wont show in Ecomm9. cant hold/pause a saleAverage once a month call to get receipt printer backupYes customer service is great based on that you can talk to someone (though I have been number 27 in line on hold) but having the same music play every time and having the service rep repeat the same line of “the developers are working on this and let me see if we have a “Workaround” their most popular word. The last workaround which involved 2 extra steps only lasted a week then they disabled it and now it is a 5 step “workaround” with no repair in sight. With all the issues I have yet to see one of them addressed or fixed in the year we’ve been with them. Nothing but cosmetic repairs and promises. Yes there are some qualities but only if you have less then 12 items in your store or you have plenty of extra time to spend on “Workarounds”.And dont forget their NO-REFUND policy.
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Would just wonder what other POS systems you would recommend for a Brick in Mortar Store. Reviews are so mixed for Lightspeed. Require a POS and ecommerce . Want to make a wise investment.
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Hi Joni,
Thank you for your inquiry. We have a great filtering tool that you can try here. I hope this helps and if you have further questions please don’t hesitate to let me know.
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I would highly recommend lightspeed retail and lightspeed ecom to any small business owner. The tech support you will receive from lightspeed is the most valuable part.Yes, there are some limitations to every system, however lightspeed seems to have a solution for everything. Be open minded when exploring software for your business, it can be difficult to know the full scope of any software you are looking for. Overall lightspeed is easy to use and allows me to keep my focus on the business and not get stuck by software limitations.
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We’ve been with Lightspeed Retail over a year and our experience has been fantastic. We recently migrated to a new computer and they were super quick to help me set up my receipt and label printers. Customer service is great and the product itself is flexible and powerful. Our store had previously used a server-based POS package from another company and I’m very glad we’re using a cloud-based solution now. We can ring up sales anywhere, check inventory at trade shows, easily email receipts, etc. Purchase orders, reports, and receivings are great, too–features we found lacking in other cloud-based systems. On my wish list for Lightspeed would be the ability to make customizations like adding our logo to our price label or creating customized reports. But overall, it’s a well thought out and reliable system.
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Great company to deal with and great service.. The product itself is easy to use once I got my training completed (again great service by Lightspeed).. Thanks. Ian
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We decided to work with Lightspeed after struggling with other more complicated POS ‘solutions’ in the past just over a year ago. Our needs were a bit specific as we had popup shops at trade shows and Lightspeed was flexible enough to work around our needs! Having everything stored in the cloud with Lightspeed working by simply having a internet connected device has cut our setup times considerably. Support from the begging up until today has been hands down awesome customer service couldn’t be easier to work with!
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Hi Shanny,
We’re happy to read that Lightspeed has been the right fit for your business and that your experience has been positive! Indeed, our product works well for both popups and trade shows, and we’ll pass on your feedback to our Customer Support team! 🙂
Thanks for the review!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
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Couldn’t have found a better retail POS software that works right from my iPad, or phone to check on inventory from the sales floor or ring up customers in line or at vendor holiday shows. Easily place products into a website which has some great free themes to choose from. Love that integrating a blog is there but it’s not as well set up as it could be for a profitable blog which is key for any business now. I’m sure they’ll have an upgrade soon. Great customer service from lightspeed at any time of day with little wait time. KelleyBlack Swan Boutique
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Kelley,
Thanks for the review! If you’d like to discuss the blog feature further, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Customer Success team: success.na@lightspeedhq.com.
Thanks again and have a great day!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed seemed like a good solution for my small business after doing some research and speaking with their salesman. What they don’t tell you is that they rush you into a sale with an offer that “expires” in the near future. They don’t give you an opportunity to test the product to see if it will work for your business (15 days is not enough time). In our case, we asked very specific questions about the management of multiple repairs for a single customer, efficiencies, and paperless receipts to which our salesman assured us their product could handle. Unfortunately it could not without adding numerous steps to the process thereby making it extremely inefficient and prone to human error. Their solution was to use specific functionality like “layaway” to circumvent their own products flow. After several sessions with their orientation specialist (spread out over sever weeks due to their limited schedule), even she said that their product can’t really do what we need it to the way we need it to. During the sales cycle, we told the salesman numerous times that we do not print paper receipts; we email receipts to our customers in order to be more environmentally friendly and therefore do not need/want a paper receipt printer. The salesman “gave” us a cash drawer as a part of our sale but the catch is that you have to have a receipt printer for the drawer to work. There are several other issues similar to the ones above where we were mislead into paying the upfront fee. Now that we’ve figured out that the Lightspeed product will not work and we’d like a refund, their customer service is nowhere to be found. They do not respond to email in a timely manner (usually weeks) and do not respond to calls.I would avoid Lightspeed simply because of their customer service and sales. Their product seems decent enough for the right business but be prepared to be swindled.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi James,
I’m sorry you’ve had a negative experience with us. I understand one of my colleagues has reached out to you and I hope we can come to a solution together.
Thanks for your candid feedback.
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We use LightSpeed Retail for our Surf Shop in San Diego, CA for our store and our website. We love how intuitive, user friendly and robust our LightSpeed system is! The live store & website inventory allows one time setup, rather than having to enter product info twice (into our POS and on our website separately), and not having to manually remove inventory from website or POS as it sells through is great. We can export any report to Excel and the batch Excel import of vendor catalogs, including SKU #, UPC, Style name & number, etc. allows quick item setup with all relevant info populated with just a few key strikes. Being web based, I can access info quickly anywhere from my smartphone. For us, Customer Support is usually very quick and always helpful.We got LightSpeed Retail early. There were some start up jitters that we worked through, as any new and rapidly growing company experiences. But LightSpeed always stepped up to address my issues and either walked me through and/or created fixes along the way and always have kept me informed of the progress and updates. They never, ever have said, “sorry our system won’t do that”, instead they have always made it their mission to figure it out and send out clearly laid out updates. Customer Service is now very quick and very informed, smart, helpful people always seem to be at the other end of the phone when I have an issue or question.Our old POS system was not user friendly, not intuitive and it was cumbersome. Our old POS did not have a live inventory or website option, Inventory and data were hard to manage, sort and view. When looking for a new POS system, I looked an several. Most were old school technology, expensive, being pushed by sales people that didn’t understand the system pros, cons, comparisons between other systems, etc. With LightSpeed, I was dealing with younger, computer geeks (meant in a nice way) that had a hand in developing and/or a deep knowledge of the technologies, and could discuss how LightSpeed could integrate into my business in a real world application to satisfy my needs, rather than me having to adapt to the limitations of another system. I can be a hater and would articulate my frustration with the best of them if I had a reason to, but for our store(s) and our application, LightSpeed kicks butt! Thank you LightSpeed, keep up the great work!Ron FriedmanMission Surf
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ron,
Wow, thank you for this detailed review! We’re so pleased you’ve been happy with Lightspeed and thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts. It means a lot to us!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
i have used LS Onsite for a long time, since the beginning it feels like. We have gone through many ups and downs with the company but have stayed with it. My biggest problem is that I am unable to check-in remotely. I like to check on how the store is doing when i am not physically in the store. I like to see what has sold, how much we have made, basic retail stuff. I have been questioning LS about this for awhile now. The answer they have given, is that they are unable to discuss it because of “privacy” issues, not sure what that means. Our LS support people said they can do it but it will cost around $25/per month plus a $100.00 set up fee. It seems like a simple request to be able to remotely view your daily sales, but for some reason it is not and I am required to pay extra for this. Not sure if it is on the “upgrade list” but it should be.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi there,
Remote access/check-in is a core benefit to Lightspeed Retail, our cloud-based product. Lightspeed OnSite is a great product as well, but it was designed to function on premise only. This said, there are ways to work around it, for example using a VPN. VPN setup is not a service that Lightspeed offers directly, but either a reseller or a local IT professional in your area set that up for you.
If you wish to discuss the matter further, we welcome you to contact us at: success.na@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Very, very poor and disappointing experience. We were promised multiple different things from Lightspeed and not only did they not deliver on any of them, they also didn’t send us the equipment we needed to get the system up and running in the first place. No scanners, no credit card readers, nothing. After 18 days of getting the runaround we requested to cancel and send what equipment we had received (cash drawers, iPad stands, paper) and lightspeed claimed they have a strict no refund policy even though we were promised by their sales team we would be given a refund if we were unhappy within the first 30 days. Extremely disappointed because the system seemed to have potential, but customer service was absolutely atrocious and one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. Proceed with caution if you are contemplating Lightspeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your feedback. We’re so sorry to hear that you’ve had a negative experience with us. We encourage you to get in touch so we can speak about this further and find a way to help you out: success.na@lightspeedhq.com
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Since we’re in Canada and it’s EXTREMELY challenging to find a POS that integrates with QuickBooks Online in Canada and that has a robust CRM component, we’re considering using Lightspeed. Have they fixed their issues of down time? How is customer service? There’s some really bad reviews about these guys online. They quoted us $180 /Mo for the basic retail package. What is everyone else paying in Canada? We’ve used Square (no CRM in Canada and high transaction fees – we pay 1.54℅ with Elavon through Costco) and recently cancelled Shopkeep (does not work with QBO in Canada and terrible customer service – charged us $80 for one days use and lied about working with QBO in Canada). Can subversive share their true experience with LS?
Cheers
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Scott,
We’d be happy to put you in touch with a Lightspeed customer with a similar business as yours. Let us know whether you would be interested in exchanging contact information so you can discuss some of your concerns. You may email us at success.na@lightspeedhq.com.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I switched my business to Lightspeed 2 years ago and could not be happier with the result. Lightspeed is incredibly sophisticated but also user friendly which is a must for me when training new employees. The best part is when I do need assistance the customer service and tech support are always above and beyond helpful. They never make me feel silly if I can’t figure something out, they just help.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ali,
Thanks for making the switch! We’re pleased you’re satisfied with our product and thanks for the kind words about our support team 🙂 We’ll be sure to pass on your comments!
Thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback!
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed has revolutionized our POS experience. From receiving to inventory control to sales, layaways and special orders it meets all our needs and more. Our service department uses Lightspeed for all work orders, allowing us to use hooks to quickly find bikes and bar codes to quickly sell out the order when done. The best thing about Lightspeed though is their support. When I run into a problem that I don’t know how to solve I’ve got a representative on the phone or chatting on the computer quickly to get me all sorted out. I highly recommend Lightspeed, especially if you are a bike shop. It’s game changing.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Brady,
We’re so glad that Lightspeed has been a good fit for your bike shop and has exceeded your needs! And thanks for your kind words about our Support team.
Thanks for taking the time to write this review!
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Has been nothing but positive. Extremely helpful in the migration from our old POS to LS, getting everything imported overnight so we had ZERO downtime. Always patient with the questions I had while getting used to the new system and quick to respond. The functionality is tons better than our old system and the reporting and features available have made everything from inventory searches to ordering much more streamlined and accurate. Cant recommend Lightspeed enough.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jim,
We’re happy you had a seamless import experience and that you’re satisfied with our product. We’ll pass along your feedback to our Product team!
Thanks for taking the time to write this review.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
When we started looking at a pos system last year, I read tons of reviews. Because of all the negative reviews from 2014 on Lightspeed, we chose to go a different route, initially. But after two failed systems in 3 months, I finally decided to give Lightspeed a try. My life has been infinitely easier since that decision. Lightspeed is not perfect, every once in a while there are glitches. However, most of the time, it delivers what I need when I need it. My inventory reports are there, I can use whatever naming protocols I want for my items, there are no 15 character limits, as were in my previous pos software. Support has been wonderful. I may have to wait a minute or two for a live chat rep to respond, but they have been consistently helpful and courteous. My store data is up to date and available when I need it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Beth,
We’re happy you came back to us! We’ll keep up the good work so you remain satisfied with our service 🙂 Thanks for taking the time to write this review!
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
A few points I would like to mention about the great service with LightSpeed for retail.
Their online support is fabulous, their employees are patient and very helpful and they answer very quickly.
I have used the 1-800 # when we first started using the POS and I would have to say that the people who helped us get the system up and running were also very patient, knowledgeable and friendly.
The system is very user friendly and general reports are easy to read etc
Thank You LightSpeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jaclyn,
Thanks so much for sharing your experience! We’re happy to read that your onboarding went well, and I will pass on your positive feedback to our Support team. Have a great day!
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed is a robust, economical, intuitive point of sale program. We have used this program for five years and it has help us grow our business while controlling our inventory and increase the inventory turns. The support for the program is excellent and we get our questions answered quickly and even changes we ask for so the program works better is considered and implemented.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Bill,
We’re so happy to read this positive feedback! Especially from a long time customer. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience!
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed it always so helpful, they know their product so well that when you have a question they can work through it. They get back to you and are always curious. Thanks for helping out all of your customers!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Sarah,
We love our customers and are always here if you require assistance! We want our product to help your business succeed.
Thanks so much for this review.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve had amazing customer service so far. I think I’ve had 3 training sessions and each time the Lightspeed employee has been very easy going, friendly and informative. I have total confidence in it so far. My retail bricks and mortar will open next month so I hope I stay happy with the system – so far so good.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Vicky,
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this review. We’ll pass on your kind words to our Product Specialists who take pride in providing quality — and friendly! — onboarding sessions to our customers.
Thanks again and good luck with your store’s opening next month! Let us know how it goes 🙂
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed is the best Point of Sale and retail support software I’ve ever used. It tracks my inventory flawlessly, and the great phone support is amazing.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi John,
We’re so happy to hear this! Thanks for taking the time to write this review.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
After send a email about some problem about my software they answer me with a call in less one hour I was writing bad review before butAfter this really good service with support I need to change it because I like my software and now they have fantastic good and fast support
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Daniel,
We’re so pleased you’re satisfied with our Support services. We’re glad we were able to help you with your problem, and thanks very much for sharing your experience with us.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have Lighspeed for around 4 years and this is the second time i have a problem with the backup and when we need support we need to pay more money after we pay around 1600 dlls they ask for renew the support plan. But is weird the backup stop working and of course we need have the info available. I have onsite lightspeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have used lightspeed for about 20 months now, and to be honest I have not liked it from the start, but I signed a 3 year contract so I am stuck with it. Currently they are having a HUGE issue with the inventory side of their program where random items are received twice on random invoices. I receive at least 2 deliveries a week, sometimes 3 or 4, and there is no pattern to this happening. Today I found 2 more times that it happened, once was in July and 15 items out of 64 were received twice, and on Sept 1, 9 out of 57 items were received twice! What makes this such a problem is: 1. There is no way to tell if items are double received, because it does not change the dollar amount on the invoice or show extra items received and 2. if you create your purchase orders using the master order and reorder points, your orders will be missing MANY items, because the system has incorrect inventory numbers. The first time I contacted their support team was February/March time timeframe, I spoke with them again August 10th/11th because I found it had happened again…still no solution to the problem and now a month later it is still happening. This costs me money every time it happens!!! I place my orders based off the master order and when it shows I have enough in stock, I don’t reorder…then I have NONE and customers have to go somewhere else to buy it! I pay for this software that costs me sales….IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEW POS SYSTEM PLEASE LOOK SOMEWHERE ELSE!!!!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have had a similar experienced. Signed long term contract and regretted it from the very start. We are utilizing the system even though we have little to no faith in its accuracy, particularly regarding inventory related matters (which obviously touches almost everything in retail). Inventory is the core of the system and if that is weak, it is a poor system. We would not buy again and would switch if it were not such a huge investment and waste of the previous investment with LightSpeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have a 3000 sf. pet store and LS seems to do pretty well for me. I tend to have much more hands attitude when dealing with the system as I don’t care for to much automation as mistakes can be made. Such as with inventory I add each item into the system myself and manage incoming product 1 at a time. Yes, this takes longer but my stock is always correct where if I used the PO’s I might have the same issues as others have had. When you trust a software solution to do to much of your work for your than issues will happen. I have had great success with customer service being great to work with… I have only had a few times when dealing with a lady that she seems very rushed and doe’s not take time with issues to help you out.
The only two real issues I would have with LS is that even the light use I do with reporting and advanced reporting I still cannot seem to get all the info I need in a way I need it. They tend to find a workaround using excel but that’s not what I pay for. It would be nice to hear them say “I see the need you have for that report, let’s put in a ticket for Tech Support and get this added”. Now that leads into my second issue is that they send me to a site to put my suggestions for changes in. That’s a cool option but as I look though the site it seems year after year none of the suggestions find resolution so that option doe’s not help much.
My suggestions to LS would be to have a team to work on the latest and greatest new features for the product as they seem to have set up now. Everyone like the new and cool stuff and change a product to do new stuff to attract new customers and evolve. BUT…..Then to have a tech team dedicated to improving and adding needed features to the current product and to address the current needs of customers already using the product.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thanks for your response, my problem with inventory has more to do with an ongoing bug in the system causing random items on random purchase orders to be double received. Yes i csn and often do item counts when putting together my orders, that does not correct the problem of inventory being WAY off. There is no report that will show when this happens, the only way to check is to go line by line on each purchase order under the inventory tab to find the 10 or 15 items that were affected. This is a total waste of my time, and for a system thst is designed to make reordering items simpler, it fails miserably!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ann,
Thanks for your candid feedback. We will pass along what you’ve shared here to our colleagues working on this bug. It’s important that our customers be heard, even when the feedback is less than positive — or perhaps especially so. Your frustration is completely understandable, and be rest assured that your experience will be shared all the way up to management.
A Customer Success Manager will reach out to you to discuss how we can improve your experience moving forward. If you wish to contact us directly, we welcome you to do so at: success.na@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thanks for the call. Everything about LightSpeed was covered today. I was able to take notes and now I am ready to use the system more comfortably. Thanks again Caro!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Christie,
We’re glad your training session with Caro went well and that you feel more comfortable using our product. If you need anything at all moving forward, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager,
Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed has outstanding customer service! I love that if I call and there is “waiting line” to be helped, I can put my number in the queue and they will call me back. I have always gotten a call back within 20 minutes, and every representative who I have spoken with has been patient and very helpful. They have trouble shooted and talked through problems with me, and helped me tremendously in setting up my POS system for my store.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Rhiannon,
We’re so pleased to read this! We will be sure to pass on this positive feedback to our hard working support staff.
Thanks for much for taking the time to share your experience. Have a great day!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager,
Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We converted to Lightspeed a few years ago and haven’t looked back. They are a great company and are very attentive to our needs. I especially like that with their cloud product I can use any OS and device which is great for my mobile staff and at trade shows. Their software has been rock solid and I cannot recall it being down ever. I’d highly recommend it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the positive review! Indeed our product is great for trade shows and pop-up shops in addition to traditional brick and mortar stores. Glad to read that it’s proved helpful for you and your staff.
Thanks again for writing and have a great day.
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager,
Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am switching from Shopify POS to Lightspeed’s Retail POS for my physical store, yet still using Shopify for e-commerce. Specifically, I am looking for an ERP that integrates with both POSs plus ship station. The main one I have found is Accumula. Does anyone have any other suggestions? or can share their experience with Accumula? Thanks!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Caitlin,
I hope my colleagues were able to answer your questions in your recent onboarding session, and that you now have a solution that works for you! I understand that you have a followup session scheduled, but, in the meantime, if there is anything else or if you have additional questions for us, please don’t hesitate to reach out: success.na@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using Lightspeed for 2+ years. Crucial piece of software to run my bike shop smoothly.
Awesome customer service and support.
THANKS!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Efraim,
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience! We’re glad to hear Lightspeed has had a positive impact on your bike shop, and we’ll pass on your feedback regarding our Support team.
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We use Lightspeed Retail in our bike shop and love it. We worked with other software vendors over the years and finally found Lightspeed when it was still called Merchant OS. They solved 80% of our inventory and customer database issues overnight. For the bike industry they set the benchmark.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ash,
We’re so happy to hear this, especially from a long time customer. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We really like Lightspeed POS for our retail game business. Our ability to take special orders and notify our customers when products they ordered arrive has increased our business significantly. The integration of other apps like Perkville is invaluable to us also. These two features alone give us an edge in our market. We have used 5 different point of sale application before sticking with Lightspeed. Lightspeed is the point of software application that is best for the way we wish to operate out business and we are VERY happy with it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
James Grasso – what is Perkville? A loyalty plug-in? Do you also do rentals and if so, can Lightspeed handle that?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi James,
We’re glad we’ve been able to help your business achieve a competitive edge! Nothing makes us happier than to hear how our product has helped retailers like yourself.
Thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using the cloud based pos system for about a year. I have found the tech support to be outstanding with minimal wait times- they remotely helped me set up all the equipment (even though I did not buy it from them) and quickly fixed any (rare) problems I have had along the way.The reason I went with this system over Shopkeep (which I tried first) was the ability to keep track of special orders and work orders. I do a lot of custom painted and personalized orders in my store, and this system helped me best keep track of my orders. Inputing my inventory was fairly quick and simple, thanks to integrated vendor catalogs. I was able to input most of my store and be up and running in about a week. Overall, I am satisfied with the Lightspeed POS.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Michele,
We’re happy to read that you’ve been satisfied with Lightspeed!
Detailed feedback like this helps us stay on track in terms of our customers’ needs, so thank you so much for taking the time to write this review.
Best,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
What is your experience using lightspeed in a retail environment with a significant amount of items in stock? I have heard some horror stories from outdoor stores that have more than 50,000 SKUs. We are considering using lightspeed in a large outdoor store that will have more than that amount of items in stock.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for your comment! Lightspeed Retail does not struggle with that number of SKUs. In fact we have many large-scale customers who are very happy with our product.
If you’d like, we can arrange for you to demo Lightspeed Retail so you can see this first hand, or, alternatively, we can provide you with a reference from a client with a similar business type. Give us a call and we’d be happy to speak with you: 1-866-932-1801 extension 1.
Thanks again for reaching out!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My only piece of advice for anyone looking at Lightspeed POS is to not get into a contract. The contract pricing in enticing but once your locked in, you have no recourse.
For example, the new webstore has monthly pricing, but if your locked into a contract you have to prepay the full amount. Monthly is not an option even though it’s a separate product. My cost to move from Lightspeed webstore (original webstore product) to the new shopping cart is just over $5000. I originally paid $5k upfront for an integrated POS and online solution. The original webstore has been offline for over a year as it is unable to handle the most basic tasks. So beware, for a non-viable POS/ web solution will run you about $5000 and another $5000 if you want one to work. So $10,000 for an operational system. For $10k there are enterprise solutions from far better companies. I’d be happy to share my experiences and even my email responses from Lightspeed. Should be an eye opener to anyone wanting to sign an annual contract with this company. I am a current client with an annual contract that does not expire until May 2018.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Charles,
Our pricing models are industry standard and we try to be as flexible as possible. We would love to get on another call with you to discuss your options. Let’s keep this dialogue open!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Charles I’m interested in learning more. I’ve been using LightSpeed for about 3 years and it’s been mostly a good experience. I’ve been disappointed by major gaps in what I think of as basic reporting (aging for instance…what has not sold in a given time period….or what is on order or has sold by category…many more I could list but you get the idea and maybe have noticed same gaps), and by the unstable and no-longer-supported Shopify uplink app. So I’m in process of converting to Web Store and curious about your experience. Thanks, Kathy
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
After paying thousands upfront on lightspeed onsite. The company is now threating me that i will have to start over with monthly rates. I have over looked huge problems with there software. I am in the middle of a IRS Audit for 2 years caused by flaws in Lightspeed. It looks like the company is only interested in more money. Lightspeed is all hype. When a company comes out with a simple POS program that works it will be all over for lightspeed. They will find that it is important to keep there customers.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Robert,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’ll have a Customer Success Manager reach out to you as soon as possible to discuss how we can help with some of the issues you’ve experienced. We sincerely want to learn more about the challenges you’ve mentioned and improve our relationship with you as we move forward.
Thanks again for reaching out and please don’t hesitate to contact us directly: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Jamie – I take it you are using lightspeed retail rather than LightSpeed onsite? I use lightspeed on-site myself and negative inventory is not a problem at all. If you’re using the retail, cloud version check with LightSpeed support. They are usually quite good about answering questions. If in fact the retail version does not do features that you find important have a look at the onsite version. I’ve had one customer do that switch and they have been very happy with it since. Well both versions are by the same company they each have their own strengths.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Trevor, I am using the cloud based retail version and, unfortunately, support is where I started and they informed me that it does not have this (basic) function. I might entertain the idea of switching to another platform had I not already dropped so much $$ on this. I figure, at best, I will have to buy new hardware. I’m thinking at this point, it’s time to start searching for a real POS system and just eat the $$ I’ve already thrown away, I’ll think of it as paying to be rid of the frusteration..it only took me 10 months to settle on this one 🙁
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jamie,
You’re right, Lightspeed Retail does not count negatives when you sell more inventory than you have in stock. It would be our pleasure to have a Product Specialist reach out to you to show you how other retailers work with our system’s auto-add feature.
For anything at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
If this is a deal-breaker, then look at the other LightSpeed Product – LightSpeed Onsite (which I LOVE). I use this myself and negative inventory is something it will count. Reach out to your sales rep to explore this option and perhaps there is a work-around in the Retail (Cloud version). This product may not be perfect, but it’s pretty darn good and I do know that support and sales will bend over backwards to accommodate requests and find solutions. If you want a candid demo about options, I can even show you first hand how Onsite counts negative inventory. My cell is 867-334-2787
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We operate several retail locations. Overall LS appears to be a good product, if you really don’t want or need any detail reporting on your sales or inventory. We asked for an improvement many months ago: it now seems to be a low priority for “product development” .We are also experiencing errors in inventory reordering on multi-unit locations. This has cost us lost sales, extra work and aggravation.I don’t understand why ownership would not be committed to prioritizing fixing code errors and improving reporting on the data it’s POS collects.. they must not be actual retail users, only code writers who don’t know how frustrating it is to have errors they have not fixed. This software is probably best for a glorified register – small business; not one that actually wants to know about it’s sales or inventory data. We feel we are needing to look at other brands now that will take these issues seriously…
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Roman,
Thanks for your feedback. Our development team has to prioritize when it comes to bug fixes and feature requests, however they do so by taking user feedback into account. We will have someone reach out to you in order to further understand the limitations you’ve experienced in terms of sales and inventory reporting.
Thanks again for reaching out and please don’t hesitate to contact us: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Customer & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Heather, we are months of being ignored and excuses about product development. I am shopping alternative POS systems now.
Brian,
Product management teams are directed by owners and sales associates, usually influenced by customers needs – they will work on what they are told to work on. I am not at ease hearing product management sets priority over code errors that cost customers money in lost product sales or aggravation. This is a problem that has lingered on for MONTHS now, indicating where product developments priorities are.
Our request on improved reporting has been in for MONTHS now.. why would you refer us to a third party to get a report from your software? I think Lightspeed is close to having a viable and useful software program – why doesn’t ownership take the remaining flaws seriously and fix them with the team they pay to produce a functional product?
I need to hear that we made the right choice for the Brains of each location, not that non user programmers are in charge. Please correct these issues. I will start looking and hope that Lightspeed will have corrected this before we find an alternative.. I would rather be putting effort into other matters than fking around with this for the months it has been.
Thank you
On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Brian Strasser wrote:
Hi Roman,
Thanks for the email. We are fully aware of the implications tied to Steve and the rest of your network. We have other franchise customers that have influential members as it concerns their networks and we understand their impact on how things can play out. Our intent is to be able to address the issues as best as we can. What we have to keep in mind, is that we have to work within the roadmap and timelines allotted to us by our Product Management team. So, the intent is there, as mentioned above; timing can sometimes be the challenge.
With regards to reporting, we have a partner, Accumula, that has build out some franchise reporting capabilities that could very well address the gaps that you highlight. I can make the introduction you or Mark so that you can explore what they have to offer. Please let me know if this is a path you would like to take.
Roman, we appreciate the continued support that you and Mark have extended to Lightspeed. We will do what we can to ensure that you and your customers continue to have a good experience with Lightspeed.
Thanks,
Brian
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Roman,
I can appreciate why you’d be frustrated if you haven’t seen any sign of change being effected on our end. The limitations you have experienced in terms of advanced reporting for multi-store has been brought to the attention of our Product Development team and it’s being taken seriously.
Someone will reach out to you to discuss your needs in more detail. We want to find a viable solution for you!
Best regards,
Heather
Customer & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have a pet shop and bought Lightspeed Retail as I had used it at other companies I have worked at. The system is easy to use and has many great functions that makes using the POS great. Tech support and sales have always been great and very helpful to me. I noticed a few bad review on here and that is to be expected. Anyone working with the public knows that no matter what you do you will not make 100% of the public happy all the time. I know on many occasions I can pretty much give product away and bend over backwards for them and they will still give me a bad review. But out of the hundred of thousands of Lightspeed users I see only a small fraction of those whom would complain no matter what anyways. There will never be that prefect fit for anyone system out there. But lightspeed works with me on helping my business run smoothly and fit my growing needs.As with anything…If you are a business person should should have done proper research and ask all the questions needed on the product you are buying so your are getting a product you need. To many people think a company should hand hold them though everything. I did my research and got a product that works for me with a staff that is very helpful to address any issues. I am very please with my selection for a POS and I hope Lightspeed continues giving customers such a high class product.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jerry I would love to hear more about how you are making lightspeed work with your store, I also have a pet supply store and I truly wish I could say that I like this program. One of my biggest issues/headaches is reorder points for items that you buy as a case but sell as an each. How do you handle setting these when say you buy a bale of food but when you get to 2 bags you want to reorder a bale? Have you tried to do inventory, I have the same problems where the system will break down a case, but it won’t work in when counting as each, if you have more than a case open.
Do you print price tags from the program, I run into the same problem for printing price tags for my each items, that come in a case.
Do you use quickbooks for accounting?
Do you have employees, I have a problem with the reports because there are things that i want my employees to have access to, but there is a lot that i don’t want them to see, and there is no middle ground.
Were you using it this summer when there were tons of outages?
Don’t get me wrong, I love importing new items, and I hate how it adds to inventory if it thinks you are out of stock….I’m very thankful for the return to vendor addition. Overall I am very unhappy with it and I wish I was not, I purchased a multi year contract so nothing would make me happier than to have it fit my needs better. Please understand I am not trying to knock your review, I really would love feedback on the what you are doing that makes you like it as much as you do. I would love to talk directly with you.
Thanks
Ann
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Ann. Please feel free to contact me at any time at my shop. It’s 812-675-8668, Jer’s Animal House. Maybe we can learn a few things in our talks.
Jer
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have a pet store as well and I have the same issues that you speak of. I am anxious to see if you get a solution that you could share with me.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tina,
We are currently working on a community forum so that we can facilitate these types of conversations between customers. We hope that it will help customers like you who are looking to exchange ideas on how to optimize the performance of our software.
In the meantime, I will have someone from our team reach out to you.
If there is anything else, or if you have questions about the forum, please don’t hesitate to reach out: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ann,
We hope that reaching out to Jerry will help you to use our product better and alleviate some of those headaches. We will soon have an online forum up and running to facilitate conversations like these. It makes a difference speaking with people from the same industry.
We’ve created a Support case for you so you can talk things out with one of our agents. They will reach out to you soon with some recommendations for the issues you’ve encountered.
Hope this helps! If there is anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Customer & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for taking the time to write this review. We’re glad you’ve been happy with our product and it’s helped your business.
We’ll continue to work hard to make sure you stay happy!
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Very unhappy with lightspeed onsite. The company is all hype. How can anyone except seeing invoice or Orders with a different total each time they open it? Or making an export to quickbooks and finding most payments didn’t export. The support at the first level is very helpful but if it’s forwarded to the next level, forget it. You would think that something so important would get a quick response. I guess those guys are working on those fancy ads and blogs. After about a week of so you will get a email saying your support request has been closed. It doesn’t help to try support again, although first level support will be nice there response is that they will get back with you soon. If you purchase Lightspeed OnSite you probably will be sorry. If any one knows a rock solid program, don’t need bells and whistles I am interested.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed support finally got back with me with a solution. I feel much better about the program and hope to continue using the product. It’s just frustrating when task are going so wrong when they are so important.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Bob,
We’re investigating why your support request had been closed before the issue was solved. We apologize for not getting to your case sooner and for the inconvenience this must have caused you.
We’re pleased to hear that your issue was solved quickly once you got in touch with a member of our team, and we thank you for your positive feedback regarding that experience.
If there’s anything else we can do for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us: success@lightspeedhq.com
Best regards,
Heather
Community & Engagement Manager, Lightspeed POS
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I feel you brother. Look like I have to sue to recover funds. My register was promised next day, 2 weeks later I was still getting excuses why I had not received saying we had an undeliverable address and they would have to speak with shipping dept before answering me. I have been receiving bicycles here for over 13 years, WOW!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Buyer beware! Our current POS register’s Mother board fried on our current register and ordered Lightspeed hardware to be delivered overnight. Not next day as promised but 3 weeks later it arrived yet to find out licensing issues that our salesman failed to mention. I ask you, are we supposed to run a 2 million dollar a year business without a POS system? Seriously. We decided to stay with current POS after all of our issues all to find out Lightspeed claims there are no refunds, wether we had a register or not for over 2 weeks. Now my attorney and BBB are getting involved! Light speed is a horrible company! Buyer Beware!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jeff,
We are so sorry for what should have been a relatively simple hardware fix but turned into a headache. We had assumed that your shipment had gone out overnight per our instructions but then later learned that it had not. We take full responsibility for this. As for the licensing issue, we are glad to hear that this had been immediately sorted out by our Customer Success team upon notification.
Again, we are sorry for the headache. We understand that you have been in touch with a few members of our team, and we encourage you to contact us any time if you wish to discuss the matter further. Thank you for reaching out with this feedback so we can try to prevent this kind of problem moving forward.
Have a wonderful day Jeff!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Team
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My experience with Lightspeed has been totally positive and I would highly recommend the company including the POS and the top notch technical support team. For us the system was fairly simple to setup, brand new store and single register. Thousands of products in our vaping store made it tedious but the 3 attribute matrix made it a lot easier to enter the combinations of bottle size and nic strengths. I have to give kudos to the awesome support team who has always been able to sort my issues out. I have also now been looking to connect my POS with Shopify through an add-in that allows to update the inventory in real time and display it on the web. I have no qualms in recommending this product very highly.
I’m not sure why the others on this page have had issue with support. For me support has been exceptional and that’s the key reason that I am recommending this product as strongly as I am. I have been able to either speak directly with a support staff or they call me back, typically in less than 30 minutes. They have always been able to sort out my problem and leave me completely satisfied.
Thanks again Lightspeeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Murad,
Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed your support experiences, and have benefited from the call back option. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to discuss the Shopify connector or other eCommerce options, as well as any other feedback you may have!
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The way we handled this with Lightspeed’s broken system was by creating a customer called “DAMAGE” – when an item is broken we sell it to that customer at 100 percent discount. You can then run a report against the damage user to see what is broken, and it keeps your daily margins and inventory correct.Id advise you to move off of Lightspeed as soon as possible. The longer you wait the more time it will take you to move, and you will find many minor and major annoyances with it that will continue to make running your business a pain. Simple features like damaging out inventory and moving inventory-on-hand into the negative when you sell an item “you don’t have” are a must-have for a retail business POS.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The system has been beyond disappointing. I understand the “no refund” policy, but the Court is likely to have a very different view if my dispute actually proceeds to litigation where it is headed as of today.
One question for you: Creating the customer “damaged” seems like a logical workaround but I do not understand how you re preventing it from impacting margin since moving there to remove from inventory will be reported as a “sale” to that customer. is there some other way you are moving it to that customer that prevents this “sale” from impacting margin?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We went live with Lightspeed retail cloud and did our inventory count at the end of the year. The shrinkage list is what you are looking for. As for damaged items, we created a customer account called spoilage and when we have damaged items torn bags, out of date parishables, etc we put it in the spoilage account which takes it out of inventory and calculates a running total.
hope this helps
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jamie,
We have noticed that you post quite frequently, with that in mind, it is in our best interest to help you. Our Customer Success Team has responded to the email you sent us, however we have yet to hear back from you. Please let us know what would be the best time to schedule a call with you in order to further discuss any questions you may have.
Thank you for collaborating with us in order to better support you.
Kind regards,
Katie
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
4 stars.. it is good, but reporting features, requires some navigation and sometimes tricks.. to get what you need.Also; Am I the ONLY One who is not happy with the fact that you can display a simple discount on a receipt properly ?3 years with Lightspeed, and nobody for any amount of money seems to be able to write the code for us to resolve this issue.I have been searching for a resolution with Lightspeed as well as outside sources.It Our only missing feature.. But it drives our commercial customers crazy trying to calculate the discounts based on the receipt printed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
we are new to lightspeed since September. Can you tell me if you have Lightspeed retail cloud? And I don’t understand what you mean by showing the discount on the receipt. Can you explain?
thanks
Tina
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Steve,
Thank you for your comment and feedback! I am glad to hear you are enjoying Lightspeed, and thank you for your many years of loyalty with us.
Since you last emailed support about your receipt in 2014, we have made a number of improvements to our print templates, which may give you the functionality that you are looking for. The template can be easily configured to show more or less discount information on each sale line.
You can see an example here that I’ve added to one of our testing accounts: http://puu.sh/msZ5Z/49b84004eb.png
If you would like me to add this template to your own account, please let me know at reviews@lightspeedpos.com, or feel free to reach out to our awesome 24/7 technical support team at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support, option 2 for Lightspeed Retail.
As for our reporting features, our development team is always working on improving our product to help benefit our customers to their fullest potential. We hope that these changes can help avoid navigations and tricks from occurring.
Thank you Steve and have a wonderful day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Succes, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have been using Lightspeed for 2 years now. We were one of the first adopters of the cloud version. We have had no end of issues with lightspeed support. We discovered a problem with the way Lightspeed calculates tax on workorders, over 6 months ago. The software calculates PST where there should be none, and where there are rues in place to prevent it. It only does it on the workorder screen, not on the sales screen. We have told them multiple times, and have been told by more than one person that the problem is fixed/getting fixed. I was told it was fixed in sept, and mid october. My co-worker was told it was fixed in December. This problem still exists. Apparently, the project lead just found out about this problem in december…..This exact same software problem happened to a major Canadian hardware chain, and they ended up getting investigated by a national news program….Over-charging tax is illegal. Calculating tax is core functionality for any POS. Lightspeed needs to fix the back end, and stabilize the core functionality BEFORE any more expansion into other markets, as well as before any more interface upgrades…..Pretty pictures are useless if the software can not add tax.Their develop by popular vote system needs to go and they need to hire proper alpha and beta testers, instead of relying on paying customers to perform this service.I also have NEVER got a callback when requested.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Doug,
We apologize for the hard times you’ve been having with Lightspeed.
We really want to help you! Please email us at review@lightspeedhq.com so we can access your account and get more information. I would love to fix this issue for you or at least give you more answers.
I understand the frustration and do not want you feeling that way!
If you would prefer, you can always contact us at 1-866-932-1801 ext:800
Thank you Doug and we look forward to speaking with you soon!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’ve now had lightspeed retail in our shop for 3 months and coming from an old mechanical till system, it really has made a world of change. Luckily the intuitive nature of the system has meant minimal training for staff. Lightspeed was the cheapest option for us – initially other systems look cheaper, but when you look at what extras you have to add (e.g. unlimited inventory) to other systems it soon becomes more expensive than lightspeed. Another plus was just being able to purchase a printer/scanner/register only. We used the PC we already had, its an old one at that – and lightspeed runs perfectly. No Ipads or branded hardware to buy with lightspeed. The matrix function for entering in our inventory has made it quick and easy to add everything. Having the Iphone app has enabled the owner of the store to quickly check our daily total wherever he is. Using the report functions we have been able to track items that are selling really well, and then reorder these items before we run out.Having phone calls from a dedicated Lightspeed employee(Jared) in the early stages helped to reduce the stress. This saved a lot of time as I didn’t have to explain a problem more than once, as we only had assistance from one person.Since then we have been using the unlimited technical support phone number and it really is brilliant, the hold times are totally reasonable and you can even request a call back which helps.All in all very happy with the service from ligthspeed!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Richard,
Your feedback is greatly appreciated! I am thrilled to hear everything is going well for you with Lightspeed.
Being cloud based, it gives customers the opportunity to work from the office, to the comfort of their own home. Like you said, our app is great because of it’s accessibility. Owners and managers can login in from anywhere in the world! It is a great way to keep track of their store when away.
Our “brilliant” Support Team is available 24/7 and have the convenient feature of giving you a call back if you do not have time to wait. Another option is our Support Chat Room, you can access it at: https://www.lightspeedhq.com/support/
Simply click on your product and in the bottom right hand corner there will be a “Chat With a Support Agent” window that you can open for some quick advice!
If ever you have any questions or concerns you can always email us at success@lightspeedhq.com or call us at 1-866-932-1801 ext:800
Thank you Richard and have yourself a great day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using Lightspeed Retail for a little less than 6 months, but I have to say that I am very glad that I have chosen this as my POS system. As a new retailer and novice to POS systems, I have had a very easy time learning how to use the system. Also, when I have run into difficulties, I have had extremely quick and thorough customer service. Whether I call on the phone, or chat online, I have had every problem resolved quickly and easily. As to the working of the system, I like the flexibility in both the public and private sides of the program, the fact that I can move seamlessly from desktop to iPad, and the multiple ways to access the data have all helped me use the system to the fullest. The place where I have felt limitations is in the Reports function. There should be a way to allow for more custom reports. All in all, though, I would recommend Lightspeed Retail to anyone looking for a POS system.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Holly,
We appreciate your positive feedback!
Our support team is great and work hard to get back to customers as fast as possible. I am glad to hear you benefited from using our chat rooms. That is also an amazing way to contact our support team.
We also greatly appreciate feedback to better our company. Lightspeed is rapidly growing and our development team is constantly upgrading our system that benefits our customers.
Thank you so much Holly and have a great day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are moving to Lightspeed after going through two other systems in two months. Both of the other systems were touted as being the best thing since sliced bread. Neither of them would do a tenth of what a POS should do. The last one was not much better than keeping track of sales on paper. Jared LaBerge at Lightspeed was extremely helpful and open about potential limitations. While we are still learning the system, we are pleased with the capabilities and functions. Kudos to Jared for his honesty and helpfulness. In spite of the negative reviews I’ve seen on this site, our experience with the customer support has been positive and definitely better than what we experienced with other companies. Keep up the good work.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Beth,
Thank you for the great feedback! I am so happy to hear things are going well and that Lightspeed is a good fit for you.
I agree, Jared is extremely honest and helpful and I am glad that you got to know him.
If ever you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by email or at 1-866-932-1801
Thank you Beth and have a great day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi JaredWe’re been using the system since the month of September. Is quite steady and good enough for our needs. Moonlight Trading Limited is a small company located in the island of Trinidad. One day we had a problem booting up the server and your help line assist us immediately and the problem was solved in minutes. No complaints, so far so good. Same with the training. One agent calls us and give us an online training.Best regards,Ray
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ray,
Thank you for your positive feedback! I am so glad to hear that everything is going well for you.
If ever you need further assistance, our support team is available 24/7 or feel free to get back to me by email or at 1-866-932-1801
Thank you Ray and have a great day!
Kind regards,
Jaime
Customer Success Manager
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I opened my shop using another platform and since switching to Lightspeed, my inventory is under control, ordering has never been easier, cash control is better than ever, and I know where I stand financially. Support is great! Whether it’s help getting the system operating to my needs, or just walking me through the steps, the support team never makes me feel incompetent.I look back and wish I would have opened my doors with Lightspped in place.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Are you sure inventory is under control? We conclude sales and the sale is nothing properly completed so that item is not actually deducted from inventory. They said “known issue”.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Kevin,
At Lightspeed it is our goal to make businesses like yours run smoothly, so to hear how well everything is going makes us very happy! We appreciate your lovely comment.
In the future if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at 1(866) 932-1801 extension 800.
Thank you for your kind words Kevin, have a great day!
Kind regards,
Katie
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’ve had Lightspeed for about 4 months now and becoming more and more frustrated with it. We battled through the months of the API being down and it not linking to our shopify store to only be frustrated with its limitations every day. Extremely aggressive sales staff will sell you a product no matter what.. I was told by one of their tech support agents when i asked why was I sold something that they knew wouldn’t work for me because of the API issues they were having that they had sales targets to meet.. Nice!! This week has thrown up another limitation. After being on hold for 45 minutes (sales staff will call you non stop, even when you tell them to stop.. getting a hold of customer support is a whole other thing) i was told that you can’t give a customer a receipt showing their grand total after issuing them a partial refund.. Their only solution was to refund the whole sale and process the items they were keeping as a new sale.. great if the customer is in store to process a new sale and you don’t mind paying double credit card processing fees. This seems like the most basic POS function and makes everyone look like amateurs. Very frustrating. I would find it extremely difficult to recommend this software to anyone.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Mike,
I’m so sorry to hear about your frustrations with Lightspeed. I remember speaking with you during the summer during the API outage, and apologize again for that huge inconvenience. I further apologize for the longer than usual wait times with support, unfortunately this is a busy time of year for us but 45 minutes is definitely not a usual experience. We are also investigating your sales experience and the support call you mentioned, and will be following up with you on this.
If you have not already been speaking with her, you will be hearing from my colleague Gabriela in Customer Success who would like to further discuss your experience with you.
Happy Holidays!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jamie,
I’m sorry to hear that the implementation of Lightspeed has been a tedious process for you, switching point of sales is never a fun experience, but I will confident that it will be worth the effort!
In terms of support calls, unfortunately this is a very busy time of year during which wait times tend to be a little longer than usual, for which I do apologize. If there is a wait time, I encourage you to leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold.
Thanks and Happy Holidays!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are also very unhappy with Lightspeed. They promise a lot and deliver very little. We signed up for their webstore to integrate with the point of sale and it’s TERRIBLE!! When I complained about it the account rep told me to wait until January when the new version comes out. To make things worse we had to prepay 3 years in advance and now they wont refund our subscription. They have a “no refunds” policy. Ridiculous! If their product was any good they would stand behind it. Support is terrible and the product is full of bugs. TOTAL WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY! DO NOT BUY LIGHTSPEED.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
When you say you HAD to pay, dont you really mean that you “chose” to pay to get better pricing? I too signed up recently and was given the choice of better pricing for a longer agreement. To state otherwise is to shift the blame.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks so much for your post! You are entirely correct, we sell our software on monthly, annual, or multi-year subscriptions. Of course, the longer you purchase up front, the more savings you will benefit from over time, but of course if customers feel more comfortable paying on a monthly basis, that’s great too!
I hope you and the staff at Tuesday’s Child have great holidays!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Agreed. Similar experience. Highly recommend avoiding Lightspeed Cloud. Highly inflexible, non-intuitive, non-configurable solution. Way behind the times. Lacking functionality that is “table stakes” for cloud software i.e. ability to save filtered reports as favorites, memorized or templates.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Matthew,
I am sorry to hear you are unhappy with your Lightspeed experience thus far. We admit that our web store is not up to par with our point of sale and we want to provide a superior integrated experience for our customers, which is why we are so excited to release our new eCom in a few weeks. We actually love our products and completely stand behind them, which is why we offer subscriptions on a monthly, annual, or multi-year basis, not only 3 years! It is because of this that we do not offer a return policy. If you would like to further discuss your support experience, feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedhq.com.
Thanks and Happy Holidays!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have had lightspeed for 3 days, everyday I have had to call in for something or another and if the “support” that I have gotten up to this point is any indication as to the quality of this product DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY! Every time I call I spend more time on hold waiting for them to find an answer than I do speaking to some one, and its for simple things, like how to delete the pre loaded vendors. My cell phone bill for overage is going to be double the $80 per month I am paying for this crap. To make matters worse, the hold music is some crap I cant understand, which frustrates me more, what happened to good old crappy elevator music, it has no words so EVERYONE understand it! I have not even gotten my hardware in the mail yet, I can only imagine what a nightmare this is going to be when I have an actual question that will require some sort of training to answer. I should have just stuck with my limited options in Square!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jamie,
I have looked in to your account and see that you have an orientation session booked for next week. The Product Specialist will walk you through every step needed in order to properly get you started and comfortable with your new software. If you already have some questions it would be good to keep them in mind because the PS will most certainly be able to answer them for you.
I also see that your hardware has been delivered this week. If you are having trouble setting that up, please feel free to reach out to us at support@lightspeedhq.com
Lastly, I apologize for our hold music, and have suggested to our IT team that they change it up!
Kind regards,
Katie
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My experience is not getting any better either. With so many dissatisfied customers being so vocal with good reason and verifiable complaints, my concern is that the company inevitably does not survive and then we are really stuck…….In my years as a software sales exec i have seen many companies do what Lightspeed is doing – over-promising, under-delivering, saying “yes” to every question regarding functionality during the sales cycle, overly aggressive sales – almost all disappear pretty quickly. I continue to be amazed at the poor design of the application, lack of configurability, inflexibility of reporting and the clunky unintuitive UI. On December 9 the General Counsel promised me a “more substantive response” to my complaints and issues including my inquiry relating to what appears to be a clear violation of Canadian privacy statutes relating to the recording of our conversations without proper disclosure…..I am still waiting on that response……
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Lightspeed appears to be incapable of solving the incompatibility of the Genius terminal, chip card reader, in completing sales. The sale sends the transaction to the credit card terminal and allows a charge to the card on Cayan. The Lightspeed software then freezes and must be closed and restarted. In the meantime, our customers become angry and some walk out the door leaving their purchases behind. This is a sporadic issue that Lightspeed cannot fix. We have been elevated to a higher level of support and they pay lip service to us but do not preform. As we approach the holiday season, we do not need these problems. Perhaps Lightspeed should use some of that $35 million they just raised to simply fix the continuing issues with their system. This is really a BAD JOKE!!!!!!!!!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi John,
I’m sorry to hear that your system is continually freezing.
This is a known bug for which our developers have come up with a fix. The update will be available in the App Store soon!
Best,
Katie
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Is this an issue for the cloud version or the on prem version?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Overall I like the system. Its head and shoulders above the previous one we were using. There are some issues that I have with it, namely the issue that as others have stated, the auto adding of inventory based on a current zero inventory. this works OK in a non inventory setting. However in a multi store chain or a situation where companies will receive inventory from a supplier based on a sale (we call them , they ship us) it doesnt work at all because you sell the item (it creates the inventory, ) then you receive the item that is sold already and it adds again the inventory instead of getting back to zero from a negative.For retailers that have varying sales taxes based on price (NYC and State) , the system falls short as you can state that an Item is taxable or not taxable however you cannot set a rule for tax, so if an item is taxable at 115.00 then falls below the tax threshold (during sale season) then it will still tax the item. It would be simple to just create a rukle that no items in catagory a) taxable below 110.00 which brings me to my next issue.In order to suggest an item be added to the system they have a suggestion/Vote method. you suggest it to the crowd and it needs to be voted on. If enough voters say Yea then it gets taken to the next level. If not enough indicate interest then they can it. This might be a decent way to work bells and whistels. However when you deal with a major shortcoming of the system it does not work. Sales tax is not a luxury, its a necessity. If the system doesnt understand how to tabulate sales tax then I should to have to call my friends to vote on it since I canot operate my store this way. And how Upper echelon management handled the Summer SNAFU was in many ways unpardonable. But the tech support is great.In summation…Overall its a decent system. It falls flat in some ways.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for your positive comments. I am glad you are overall enjoying your Lightspeed experience!
Unfortunately the negative inventory is a popular customer comment. We are aware of the problem and it will be a top priority for our Product Management team in 2016.
Our tax system does allow for different rates on each item based on location, however we recognize that it may be incompatible with the current tax laws surrounding clothing retailers specifically in New York and Massachusetts, for which we apologize. It sounds like you are already familiar with our workaround for this issue, but please feel free to reach out to our Support Team with any further questions.
I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the outages this summer. If you would like to further discuss these issues do not hesitate to contact us at success@lightspeedhq.com.
Kind regards,
Katie
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Not intuitive, inflexible, poorly designed, extra clicks on many routine actions. Support hold times and call backs are often quitelong. Support does the work for me rather than teaching me (may explain long hold times). Reports have numerous useful filters but filtered reports/templates/favorites cannot be saved meaning filters must be selected each and every time key reports are run. Ability to save filtered reports exists in far less expensive applications and are “table stakes” in the SW and cloud applications space. Some key reports only available with export feature which takes more time, reformatting and must be filtered and exported each time report is to be run. I could go on but bottom line, very disappointed – great sales and marketing combined with the “end of quarter, boy have I got a deal for you” totally obscured awful product management and development. Purchased 4 year subscription – looking for replacement in 2nd month. The $6k pales in comparison to the damage to the business and incremental expense lost in productivity and morale resulting from the application’s deficiencies. Feel free to contact me if you want specifics. Would not want any fellow retailer to go through what we have for the past 45 days since making this mistake.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Steve,
I’m sorry to hear you’re not enjoying your Lightspeed experience so far. I have looked around in your account, and from what I see, our system should be a great fit for your business! It seems you have particular set of product features which I can communicate with our Product Management team. If you would like to discuss this further, feel free to reach out to us at reviews@lightspeedhq.com.
Thanks and have a great day!
Kind Regards,
Angela,
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have had Lightspeed for almost two years and have just sold the business to anther group that will be using it login forward. When I saw all this stuff about downtime I actually didn’t know what they were talking about because we never experienced it. I mean Comcast is down regularly but not Lightspeed at least not in the Central Time Zone. We open at 10:00 and close at 21:00 six days a week. Hope this helps everyone.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Al,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! So happy you weren’t affected by our outages in the summer.
Have a wonderful day!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
What is going on with the ratings? This is a 5-star product and if I add up the star average, it should be at least 4 starts. It seems the comments make no difference to the product rating which is not right. Merchant OS (http://www.merchantmaverick.com/reviews/merchantos-review/) was this product before Lightspeed purchased it got 4.5 start – and suddenly this one only gets 3? I just started using this site to find other POS solutions but the lack of a rating change is giving me doubt about how valid the merchant maverick comments are with the star rating. It seems Jordan Nelson was confused by the two versions which really is not that confusing. Perhaps rename this one Lightspeed Retail and give a new review for Lightspeed Onsite which is the stand-alone, non-cloud based version. I use them both and in my opinion, both deserve 5-stars. I use Onsite more and my businesses would not be able to function the features and service Lightspeed provides. Come on merchant maverick – what gives with only 3-starts? If the stars stay the same as the reviewer set it do, then I must protest. How can a 4.5 star product suddenly become 3 starts? Why are the other comments having no effect on the 3-star rating.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Trevor,
My name is Amad and I’m the Founder of Merchant Maverick. I’d like to address some of your concerns about our Lightspeed rating.
Before we get started, I noticed that you’ve left another comment on our site in the past.
Specifically…
Can you tell me if you’re a Lightspeed reseller?
Now, to answer your concerns:
When you add up all of Lightspeed’s user star ratings, the average is actually 2.5. If you’d lke to confirm that number, I encourage you to do the math on your end. So, in reality, we’re rating Lightspeed higher than actual Lightspeed users. But that’s ok because we understand that most customers are more likely to complain than to praise a company, so we adjust our ratings based on our expert opinion. The ratings that we display to our users is our own “editor rating” not an average of user ratings.
Recently Lightspeed has made an effort to get their existing customers to leave positive reviews about Lightspeed on our website. We encourage this type of activity from all of our vendors, but if you look at the recent influx of 5-star ratings, they only go back to about October 26th. Prior to that date, there are many many 1-star ratings for Lightspeed.
Lightspeed was a 4.5-star POS system on our website for years, but after the recent influx of complaints about customer support and about Lightspeed’s recent crash, we were forced to lower their rating. Once Lightspeed resolves these issues we will be happy to increase their rating again.
Can you tell me why you think Jordan was confused about the different versions? There is a note at the top of the review in bold font that explains the difference between both products (OnSite vs Retail). Jordan has spend hours upon hours researching different point of sale systems. She’s more competent than most POS consultants I know (including myself) and she definitely does not get confused by these systems, so I was a bit surprised that you thought she couldn’t tell the difference. If you can clarify that would be great.
I think that I touched on this in earlier comments, but to reiterate, our editor ratings are not directly influenced by user ratings. We use them as only part of our editor score, but just because Lightspeed has made an effort to get customers to leave positive reviews, doesn’t mean that it will immediately affect our score of Lightspeed.
With all of that said, we are constantly updating our reviews, so we will periodically revisit Lightspeed to see how things have improved. We already know that the product is great, so if there are improvements in other areas (namely customer support and uptime), then we will definitely increase their score again.
Thank you for your comments. I hope this gives you the answer you’re looking for.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am new to LightSpeed, so far I am very happy with the system and support that I have received. I own a childrns boutique and it has made entering and managing my inventory simple. I also have received great technical support each time I have called.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Anne,
Welcome to the Lightspeed family!
Glad to hear you’re enjoying it so far!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have worked in the Retail world in Los Angeles/Beverly Hills, CA for over 25 years now and today, I worked with Alexandre T. (Product Specialist) – and was extremely happy with the level of professionalism and support he provided to help me with my questions. He was patient, informative and most of all successful in completing all tasks per my request. It is very clear that the entire team is knowledgeable and eager to provide their customers with accurate products and tech support that is far superior to any other retail system available. I have worked with ‘many’ P.O.S/online/Retail Software systems and I would highly recommend LIGHTSPEED RETAIL to ALL business merchants and retailers. It’s not easy to impress me, but today…I was very impressed. THANK YOU ALEX and to the team at LIGHTSPEED RETAIL!! You guys are amazing!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Matthew,
Thanks so much! I agree, Alex is amazing, we’re so happy to have him on our team! If you need anything else from Alex, myself, or anyone else on the Customer Success team, do not hesitate to reach out to us at reviews@lightspeedpos.com.
Thanks and have a great day!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’m a new customer, so I’m mostly reviewing the sales process. I felt that the people at Lightspeed answered all my questions and I chose the solution based on comparisons with quite a few other products. Lightspeed Retail was one of the very few that offered a seamless platform for POS and ecommerce, which was a big requirement for me. Some other products could do that, but their interfaces were very clunky. Lightspeed Retail is easy to navigate and has a lot of features that I was looking for: gift cards, matrixed products, importable catalogs, purchase order receiving, and much more. So far I’m happy with the level of service – members of the team have been checking in on me every so often to make sure I have what I need.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Gillian,
Thanks for your kind words and welcome to Lightspeed! Glad to hear you like our interface and that you found the sales team knowledgable. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us anytime should you need anything else!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
As a new company, I researched several POS systems that would make my life easier. Lightspeed Retail offered the best of all worlds. It offered me the opportunity to create a program that worked for me and my business. They answer questions quickly, efficiently and assist me to find the best solution for my business. Thank you.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi John,
Glad to hear that you found our team efficient and knowledgeable and that Lightspeed is the best fit for you. Glad to have Wynner Sports Group onboard, and hope you had a great orientation experience with us!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve been using Lightspeed Retail for a little over a year now and I have found the overall experience to be great. Lightspeed has a great product for small retailers, specifically due to it’s flexibility as an inventory management software. Due to the nature of our particular business we have a very different setup and workflow compared to most retailers, and have always been able to accomplish everything we need to do with the tools included in the POS. The few hours of downtime we experienced this past year were admittedly frustrating as we heavily really on the software to manage the custom assembly of our products. Luckily, we had a backup that we were able to use temporarily as we had foreseen this as a potential tradeoff to the completely untethered nature of a Cloud POS. Since Lightspeed Retail relies on having an active internet connection, I couldn’t recommend more to retailers looking into a Cloud based POS (not just Lightspeed), to have a backup internet connection (USB data stick for us). With this in mind, I still believe Lightspeed Retail to be the best choice for my business, short of a custom solution. I’ve always had a great experience with their support staff who have been nothing short of a pleasure to deal with. The response times for support can vary depending on the time of the day, but if I catch them outside of the EST peak hours, they will gladly take the time to train me on a new feature. Having done a bit of shopping around prior to subscribing to Lightspeed, I’ve noticed most of the main POS solutions seem to suffer similar complaints revolving around growth. Start your shopping early, sit through some demos and you will find the right POS for you. For Rebicycle, it was Lightspeed and we still stand happy by our choice.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Andrew and the Rebicycle team,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, always nice to hear kind words from someone local here in Montreal. Glad to hear that despite some unfortunate circumstances this summer that you still feel that Lightspeed Retail is the best fit for your business and that you were happy with your choice.
Have a wonderful day!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have always begun my staff trainings on LightSpeed with the following statement, “LightSpeed’s greatest asset is also it’s grandest fault. It has the ability to perform every function that a retail store might need from POS software.” In the last four years, our business has grown from one location to eight across two states. LightSpeed has been our POS solution since we opened and has served us very well. In response to many of the points made in past comments, LightSpeed Retail does indeed perform many of the functions that users claim it does not. The issue at play can likely be attributed to a lack of training/understanding of the software as a result of its vast array of capabilities. I wouldn’t choose any other software for our business. It has all the features to fit our needs, their customer service is second to none (shout out to Dave), and the product development team listens to feedback and incorporates changes accordingly.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi John,
Thanks so much! I passed on your shout out to Dave. Congratulations on the growth of your business, we’re so happy that Lightspeed has been a part of your journey.
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I operate a golf shop and have used Light Speed now for 5 years. Very pleased with the product and support.
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Hi Jeff,
Thanks for sticking by us since the MerchantOS days! So happy to have you onboard!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Our experience with lightspeed so far (as we migrate from the old POS system) has been nothing but positive. It streamlines everything, be it retail or in the workshop- it’s a perfect fit. The support staff have been great in helping us every step of the way, looking forward to making the switch to lightspeed as soon as we receive the new hardware.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi James,
Glad to hear you’re enjoying the software so far! I hope you had a great onboarding experience with Tina; do not hesitate to reach out to us if we can help you with anything else along the way!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’ve been using Lightspeed Retail for close to a year now and have been very happy. My biggest compliment is how user friendly the entire platform is. The system is very intuitive which saves me hours when training a new employee. Any computer-literate person can jump in and figure out the essentials on their own in a matter of minutes. I’m still learning the ins and outs of some of the more advanced settings/reports, but if they’re anything like the features I use daily, I suspect I’ll be happy with those too.I’ve had to call customer support several times over the last year, and each time has been a pleasant experience. Most recently, I was on hold, waiting for a representative to pick up. After about 30 seconds, I was offered to have them call me back once one became available. It worked well because I could go back to working on other things. About 20 minutes later, I got the call, the rep immediately fixed one of my issues, then said he’d have our account manager call back to help with my other question (he wasn’t able to make the changes I was requesting). Our account manager called back later that day, and after doing some research, got us exactly what we were hoping for (thanks again, Sarah!). I can understand people’s dissatisfaction with being on hold or waiting for someone to call you back. If it’s an urgent issue, that would be very frustrating. Maybe we’ve been lucky, but none of the issues I’ve had to call about have been time sensitive so it worked really well having them call me back instead of being stuck on the phone waiting for someone to pick up.All in all, we’ve be very satisfied with their service. Hopefully things continue to improve!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Justin,
Thanks for your kind words! I agree, Sarah is amazing! Glad to hear you’ve enjoying your experience working with her and our support team. Also awesome to hear you find the system user-friendly, if you would like some training on those more advanced features, do not hesitate to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and I would be happy to arrange for a one-on-one session with one of our Product Specialists.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am pretty new with the software, but the support has been great!! I am impressed so far and don’t see any issues, very easy to work with!
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Hi Melody,
So glad to hear you’re enjoying your Lightspeed experience so far! I believe my team has been trying to reach out to you regarding training, so I’m glad to hear everything is going well!
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed has been a great resource over the years. Today we upgraded to El Capitain and as a result we could not process payments anymore. I was able to speak to a person in the support department very quickly. Once he understood the situation was able to provide a solution right away. With improved integration with Apple GSX LIghtspeed has been tool that has improved the overall efficiency of our daily work.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Steven,
Glad to hear that our support team was able to help you out so quickly!
Thanks for sticking by us over the years, can’t tell you how much we appreciate it!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I work with an Apple Specialist company and the LightSpeed Onsite Apple/GSX Integration is critical to our business. The eCommerce Add-On allows our customers to log in (via FaceBook or Registered account) and view their Workorders. This gives customer that ability to see their workorder progress in real-time. When LightSpeed acquired LightSpeed Retail (was Merchant OS) there were some growing pains, but today we had to make a support call and it was resolved in less than 5 minutes including the time to dial. The Customer Service has improved 500% in the last 6 months. There is also an online forum where you can make requests through a voting system. If you have any Lightspeed account, be sure you log into into the mylightspeed account to make your requests known (get 20 votes). They are a growing company that really listens to their customers and are constantly improving the program. There is not another program on the market suitable for our business that integrates Service, Apple API, eCommerce, CRM, and powerful inventory management. I absolutely love this program. The accounting Export is basic using Journal Entries which is my only complain, but it’s not a big deal once you understand it. We use AccountEdge for our accounting and LightSpeed DOES export to it. AccountEdge works better for us since we are in Canada. Also, The Onsite version in Canada also supports Moneris of both local and online processing (may want to update in the review). Moneris processing also plugs directly into Lightspeed do there is no need to manually enter payments. This saves a lot of mistakes.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Trevor,
I appreciate you taking the time to write your thoughts! Glad to hear enjoyed your support experience, and I will also pass on your words to our Product Management team. They are the ones constantly checking which features our customers are looking for, so I’m glad to hear you are using the forum to submit your requests! Feel free to also pass any of your thoughts to me directly at reviews@lightspeedpos.com.
Thanks again!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have been using LightSpeed since opening our shop in November 2013 & it was one of the best decisions we initially made to make us successful! Inventory control is super important to make sure a shop never runs out of hot items & LightSpeed makes that possible.
Just added their web-store feature & super excited!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Kevin,
Glad to hear you’ve had a happy couple years with us! We’d love to help you get onboard with eCommerce as well, feel free to reach out to the Customer Success team at onboard@lightspeedpos.com and they’d be happy to set you up with an onboarding session for your web store.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed has been an amazing choice for my new business, I couldn’t be happier!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thanks so much Madelyn!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using LightSpeed for over 5 years now. Truth be told that I am always on the lookout for something new and better but have yet to find it. While the company has had its growing pains I am very exited to see what happens next.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Benn,
Thanks for sticking with us all these years! You’re right, we have had some growing pains, and I’m terribly sorry if they greatly impacted your business, but the good news is those days are now behind us. Be sure to check out our amazing new Return to Vendor feature, and stay tuned for some amazing announcements coming this fall!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
New version was released today. The company is doing a nice job of upgrading the Onsite/Pro version which is what I use. I am thinking of switching over the the Cloud Version (LightSpeed Retail) since a lot of my business is mobile. The Pro/Onsite version is just so powerful and feature-rich. It has smart finds, a powerful import feature. Both are good products and I have found the support over the last year went from so so to great.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Trevor and the team at Fly Yukon Paragliding,
Thanks for your comment, and glad to hear you’re loving our support! I’d love to have a conversation with you regarding our cloud-based platform to weigh the pros and cons with you. Feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com to set up a time for the call, or simply call our main line at 1(866) 932-1801 and hit Option 1 for Sales and any of them would be happy to help you.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are a company that does retail and lots of service. The service module for LightSpeed Pro/Onsite is fantastic. The receiving an inventory management are invaluable tools. If we had not made the switch to LightSpeed seven years ago our company could not have kept up with the increase in business. Their support has also greatly improved in the last year.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Dear MEDIAsolutions,
7 years, wow! Thanks for your continued patronage, so happy to hear you’re still loving OnSite!
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have been using lightspeed as our Small Business POS for about 3 months now, we switched over from Square, it tons of great features we didnt have previously. All in all this is an outstanding product. Easy to set up and easy to use for us and our employees. Thanks again David and the whole lightspeed crewTiffany
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tiffany,
Glad to hear you’re enjoying our product so far! I’ll be sure to pass on the kind words to David. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our awesome 24/7 technical support team should anything come up, and hope you continue loving your Lightspeed experience!
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have had a great experience with Lightspeed. I have been using the system for the past 3 years. I have used the tech support several times and usually have my issue resolved in a timely manner. If my initial support can’t solve an issue, they typically have someone higher in command jump in to help resolve an issue. I would definitely recommend to this POS system to others.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Eve,
Thanks for your kind words! We think our support technicians are pretty stellar too, and yes, we have an internal escalation system to ensure that your query will be answered, even if it isn’t by the first person you speak with.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed was a huge upgrade for our company and has made inventory management and customer service much easier since our switch last October. I know there for awhile we were experiencing a little bit of trouble with the servers as were many others, however upgrades were done during convenient hours and for relatively short periods of time. Our sales rep has always been quick to reply or help with any problems that come up. A great feature that we have begun to utilize is the webstore and inventory upload. The webstore is clean and works extremely well, and the inventory upload is extremely helpful. I rate the program with 4 stars with an expectation of 5 coming very soon.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Pro Skate USA!
Thanks so much! I’m sorry if the server outages greatly affected your business, but thankfully those days are now behind us. We also have some great news coming in the near future pertaining to our eCommerce, so we feel confident those four stars will soon become five as well!
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My review will be short. I love Lightspeed Retail POS…when it works. Which is like 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time is infuriating and costs me in excess of $5-10,000 a year in sales whenever they’re down for whatever reason. If you complain, usually all they offer in return is a free piece of hardware or a free month of service. Nice, but not comparable to thousands of dollars lost and my staff pulling their hair out with 50 people in line.Unfortunately we paid in advance for a few years so we’re stuck for now. To be fair, they seem to be constantly working on the problems. But if they don’t fix the regular episodes of down time by the time our contract is up, I’ll be looking at other options for sure.As an aside, their webstore/e-commerce solution is the most UN-user-friendly program I’ve had the misfortune of trying to set up. Even my website programmer had a hard time with it. I’d recommend any newbies steer clear of that option.
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Josh, we are in the process of evaluating this software. Are you still dealing with downtime?? For us it is important that we dont have any downtime.
Thanks
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We were utilizing an old piece of software with Intuit called Quickbooks POS. It was a great relief for us to find lightspeed. It was easy to implement and get started. We looked at several POS’s and found it very easy to work with Lightspeed. In particular, our salesman, Alex, was able to assist us with the shift. The big thing for us is inventory and it is so nice to have a scanner that actually works! I’ve had excellent experience with technical support and despite a few glitches when they were getting more servers, it has been really great for us. We love the reporting and being able to track history of what we do with the system. Overall, it has been a great shift.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Suzanne,
Thanks so much for sharing your experience! We do apologize for the difficult time when we were upgrading our servers, but are happy that that difficult time is behind us! I will certainly let Alex know the kind words you said and please let me know if there’s anything else we can do for you!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Working with Lightspeed for a few years now. It is working great for us, we’re managing three locations downtown Boston. I have a great experience with their customer support, they take the time and give me some good feedback and help. We’re happy and looking forward to our second Black Friday!
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Hi Bert,
Thanks for taking the time to post such kind words! Glad to hear things are going well for you down in Boston, and I will you a smooth and successful holiday season.
Happy Halloween!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am concerned about their accounting with QuickBooks. We know that their history inventory does not work. You run it one time and get one number and a few transactions later everything has changed for past months. I have cash being reported that it is not in credit cards nor cash sales. I wonder if the accounting does really work.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi David,
Thanks for your post! We appreciate your concern, and I highly encourage you to reach out to our technical support team for any questions regarding QuickBooks or any other accounting questions. I can assure you that accounting in the form of our Quickbooks export is solid and we are working with Shogo to develop an integration that should give you more options as far as syncing with different accounting softwares.
Hope this helps, and as I said, feel free to reach out to our 24/7 technical support at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support, option 1 for Lightspeed Retail. If there is a wait time, I suggest you leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold.
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am so tired of paying top dollar for bargain basement product and support. Maybe some of the venture capitalists should take a look at the reviews before they fork over their money. It is now 11:00 EST and I have been on hold for 30 min. for support because when I try to install LS server I get a “The authorization server had an error” message. It’s ridiculous.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Larry,
I’m sorry if you experienced higher than normal wait times; our wait times are normally only a few minutes, but during peak retail times, they can be longer than this. I encourage you to use our call back feature so you can keep your place in hold without having to wait on hold. I can see that your support ticket was solved and that you were upgraded to the newest version of Lightspeed OnSite, I hope you are enjoying it!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
It’s also worth mentioning that if you want to be EMV compatible, you need to process payments via Cayan and that you need to lease the EMV compatible Genius terminals from them at $20/month per terminal. To make matters worse, you need to sign a 3 year contract in order to lease the terminals and there is $195 termination fee per terminal. That means that if you want to be EMV compatible, you are essentially signing a 3 year long contract with lightspeed since these terminals are specifically programmed to work with Lightspeed only and are being leased. I have a two registers so that would be an additional $40/month for me and if you’re on a month to month plan with lightspeed, your new monthly fees now add up to a whopping $189/month if you want to accept EMV cards. I also asked if I could purchase my own Genius terminal which is the Verifone MX915 and have it programmed to work with Lightspeed and I was told that it wouldn’t be possible since Cayan/Lightspeed install their own proprietary software into the terminals. So to sum things up, if you want to accept EMV cards with lightspeed, be prepared to shell out another $20/month per register and be tied into a 3 year long contract with a $195 termination fee.
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We are having issues getting this setup; we go thorugh Lightspeeds instructions but in the terminal setup is says disconnected. any ideas? Any special directions? We have it plugged into our router directly.
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Hey Mark,
Just call our awesome 24/7 technical support team and they would be happy to guide you through that set up. Feel free to reach out to them at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support. If there is a wait time, I suggest you leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Lawrence and the team at Oak & Barrel,
Although Cayan is our preferred merchant processor, we are not strictly affiliated with them, so although I do not want to comment on them, I can assure you that it does not affect your Lightspeed account. Yes, EMV hardware is expensive because fraud protection is so important, but talk to your Account Manager at Cayan for the best rates possible.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed Retail on an iPad has a serious bug in which some scans in POS mode are mapped to the incorrect product. This results in customers being charged for the wrong product and all your inventory getting screwed up. Many retailers are being affected by this serious bug yet Lightspeed Retail has not sent a warning out to it’s customers about this bug because there are so many other problems I guess they don’t to raise visibility to this issue. I’m very concerned about the lack of transparency and the potential other known issues that they are keeping secret. Not a good time to join Lightspeed. They are scaling customers too quickly and their software can’t handle it. Lost of bugs, performance issues and disabled features. So many bugs that customer service is backed up… you have to wait a long time on the phone for support or you get an email response 3-5 days later. Not good enough if you have an urgent problem.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Walter,
Hopefully you’ve noticed in the time since posting that this bug was fixed on October 6th! If your system is still not working correctly, simply uninstall and reinstall the app and you should be good to go! In terms of support, rather than emailing, I suggest you call the support team at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support, option 1 for Lightspeed Retail. If there is a wait time, I suggest you leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I find it a bit odd many of these reviews were not published until the day that Lightspeed successfully announced a new round of venture capital funding to help “solve it’s problems” with regards to performance and capacity.
Literally within an hour of the e-mail announcing their successful funding, a slew of over 20 reviews – almost all overwhelmingly negative – were suddenly approved by the moderator on this site.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence…
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Agree 100% I do not believe it a coincidence. These comments were clearly held back. I have called them many times asking for my money back to be told they will get back to me and never here from them. I have a meeting with a law firm to discuss a class action lawsuit.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Please keep me/the site posted on what your attorney tells you. I have the exact feelings and am debating what to do. LS should be compensating all of their customers for the lost time. Note – been on hold for 30 minutes for tech support.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are also working with counsel on rescission and damages claim. Lightspeed Retail falls far short of best of breed cloud applications. We have found it to be inflexible, non configurable, unintuitive, clunky, poorly designed from a PM perspective. Virtually everything is hard coded without flexible configuration options for the user. This inflexibility is reminiscent of on premise software. Lightspeed is among the legions of companies that have jumped on the cloud bandwagon that treat the cloud like a “place where software is hosted” vs. a new paradigm in which non-IT, tech savvy business users can deploy, configure, and administer with ease to meet rapidly changing business requirements. Lightspeed just does not get what the Cloud is all about which is adaptability, subscription model for the benefit of the customer, lower cost, lower capacity requirements because of shared resources, ease of deployment, configuration, administration and flexible reporting. While poor design alone is not enough to warrant rescission and damages claims, there is much more I will not share publicly that we believe will ultimately prevail in litigation.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Michael,
It actually is a coincidence. We were recently contacted by a Lightspeed user who informed us that some parts of our Lightspeed Retail review is out of date so I took a second look at the review. That is when I noticed that over 70 comments had gone unmoderated over the past several months and we do apologize for that. We try to keep up on moderation, but with thousands of comments, sometimes they can fall through the cracks. All comments–whether positive or negative–are welcome on our site. I am in the process of updating this review right now and will have the latest version published within the next couple of days. If you have any questions about Merchant Maverick’s review process and how we make our money, please follow this link for some more information.
Thanks,
Jordan
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
what hardware are you using in your shop ?
does it meet Lightspeed’s minimum technical requirements ?
have you considered upgrading the hardware, RAM etc ?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have migrated from the desktop version of LightSpeed to the Cloud version 1 1/2 ago and it has been a mixed bag. Some issues relate directly to LightSpeed, some come along with any cloud based service. So here are my recommendations and my comments.1. If you use a cloud-based business software like a POS, you must have a high speed stable internet connection. You can’t go cheap and you can’t do DSL or some nonsense like that. You will need to get business class speed internet and pay for it.2. Regardless of who your internet provider is, your service will go out on occasion and you need to have an off-line back-up plan in place. Same goes for running your credit card processing over the internet versus old fashioned copper lines. 3. You need to have a compelling reason for using a cloud-based version of any business software including LightSpeed. Meaning, be very clear what advantages you have using the cloud versus the desktop version. In our case, we have 6 stores in 3 States and yet we are still a mom and pop shop and did not have the ability to establish and maintain a classic network to connect the stores. LightSpeed cloud gives me total connectivity in a multi-store environment and allows me to run many important tasks remotely, where for a single store or all stores. That was vitally important to our business, so much so that I took the risk to run my system cloud based.If you don’t have any true compelling reason, stick with the desktop versions.4. LighSpeed Cloud is not based on the LightSpeed desktop software of the past, they are completely different platforms. So don’t expect an easy transition.Having said that, here are some comments to the LightSpeed team:1. Your customer service/tech support is spotty with many of your technicians rather rude and impatient.2. You often implement changes, enhancements and upgrades clearly without testing their effect on the rest of the system on a ‘MIRROR SYSTEM”. You test them on the life versions your customers use and that has caused many service interruptions. I have told your staff over and over again – you must have a mirror system that is identical to the one your customers are using but separate. You test any releases down to the most rarely used functions to make sure its stable – then you release it on your customer’s version.3. Our subscription is up in 10 months, if you are at this point still not able to implement negative inventory numbers but instead magically add quantities to our inventory WE MUST LEAVE YOU for a company that understands accounting and inventory control – because you lack basic understanding of these two subject matters. That is about as kind as I can be right now.4. While I am sure you have a long list of enhancements in the works and demands from customers, your future is in the multi-store environment. You need to enhance those functions especially inventory control including the ability to move inventory between multiple stores simultaneously not one store at a time. I gave your staff once a life demonstrations of how businesses that have 2-10 stores share inventory – it can’t be done in your system. I still use my filmmaker Pro template and import my stores inventory so I can do an intelligent decision how to re-distribute inventory among stores depending on their performance.3. Get with it and build a Quickbooks Online integration for revenue reporting.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Holger,
Thank you for writing such a detailed review; I completely agree on your points that you need to have a stable internet connection for cloud-based software, and that it works great for multi-store environments.
You’re completely right that our Lightspeed OnSite and Lightspeed Retail are two entirely separate platforms and the transition between the two will not happen overnight, however we do have teams in place to ensure a smooth transition. Your Account Manager should be able to lay out a plan for you, you can submit your inventory and customer lists to our Imports team so that they will do the importing legwork for you, the Customer Success team will reach out to you to schedule onboarding to ensure you receive adequate training, and we also have 24/7 technical support who are always there to answer your questions.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly at reviews@lightspeedpos.com if you ever have an issue with one of our support technicians, I’m incredibly sorry to hear that you found them rude and impatient. I took a look at your account and saw that you haven’t reached out to our support team since May, so I hope that the next time you do, you have a superior experience!
Holger, we do in fact test all our releases on a staging environment! Every single coding change is tested, regression tests are performed, and everything is done in beta before public releases. Of course with any software, bugs can still happen, but the service interruptions that happened this summer were unrelated to product releases. We were simply upgrading to larger, more modern servers, and like any cloud-based software, had a few outages that unfortunately happened at peak retail times, and I do apologize profusely for that.
We are committed to delivering negative inventory, but it will be the largest feature we work on to date, and we cannot commit to a delivery date at this time; there will be incremental value delivered along the way to a negative inventory.
Unfortunately I don’t quite understand your point regarding the multi-store inventory, but if you would like to set up a call with myself or one of our Product Managers, feel free to email me and we can set up a time for a call.
Finally, in regards to your final point about a Quickbooks Online integration… it’s coming!!!
Thanks and have a great day!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
It does amaze me that someone can complain about a web store that costs $45/month. The LightSpeed webstore is just an entry store. Second step would be Shopify, it’s a simple store with lots of templates.If you want a more robust store, go with Magento, X-cart Clasic or Bigcommerce.Nick
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Nicholas,
Thanks for commenting! We also agree that the Lightspeed web store isn’t quite up to snuff with our POS, however we have some incredibly exciting announcements coming this fall regarding our eCommerce, so stay tuned! We hope you will be as excited as well are!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Remarkably unstable and poorly supported. If I hadn’t committed so much in switching to their service, I’d ask for my money back. The basic design of the software is excellent, as it was when these people bought MerchantOS. Lightspeed is really not a professional operation as far as I can tell.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ashok,
Sorry you haven’t been enjoying your Lightspeed experience as of late. I realize that the outages caused you to lose faith in our company and think our product is unstable, but the good news is our developers have been working around the clock to improve and stabilize our servers and we haven’t had an outage in two and a half months. If you would like to further discuss you experience, feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and we can set up a time for a call.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed has the worst customer service I have ever encountered including Comcast.
I have not been able to invoice a customer without their assistance on team viewer for two full weeks now.
It crashes constantly. It takes hours on hold to get tech support. Hold music includes “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
I am going to go back to Windows POS system that is not connected to the internet, and completely reliable.
Caveat emptor. Lightspeed is expensive, unreliable, and frustrating.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Ann Peterson’s review is right on point:11 months later promised reports are not forthcomingAdding product at the register rather than going negative is idioticNo way to return stock to a vendor implies they have no practical business experienceTheir infrastructure apparently can’t handle the volume.On the positive side, they have a great sales department.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using Lightspeed since october 2010 and have noticed that it is not very reliable, and switching to comcast seemed to make it worse.
Now, I have replace my comcast rental modem with a real Netgear modem, and the problems continue to go unresolved and grow.
Lightspeed’s customer service makes Comcast look REALLY good by comparison.
No response to chat requests, hours on hold for technical support, awful hold music on a short loop, FOR DAYS ON END.
Tier 2 support requested monday called me on a saturday morning. I had no internet access because I was changing modems. Made an appointment to be called back 11am tuesday morning. No call back, software does not work and will not restart.
Claim 00294928 has gone on for more than a week. I have been unable to write an invoice without Lightspeed help on Team Viewer.
I cannot run my business this way. I am going back to windows. I hope Lightspeed gets this fixed well enough for me to get my affairs with it closed out.
Worst customer service, ever. Takes 90 minutes at least on hold to get through 7 callers ahead. There are 17 now. Lightspeed needs a class action suit. They are really unforgivably terrible.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed doesn’t even get a star from me. I have been using them for 2 years now and it keeps getting worse. Their support before the acquisition (MerchantOS) was good- not awesome, but good. Now it is terrible. The inventory numbers don’t add up and the customer service person said, hopefully it will be fixed soon. How can I run my business on a “hope”? The servers have been going down for many weeks and they turn functions off to load balance. Then a customer’s card was swiped 3 times as it wasn’t going through on Lightspeed- or so it appeared. Now I have an irate customer as he was charged 3 time. They say- call the credit card processor. I asked for my account rep to call me….nothing yet. They call when they want to sell me something. I guess they must know I am not buying.
BUYER BEWARE–do not waste your time
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Merch OS was a product we were happy with. It was not without issues, but with very quick, very helpful support we always had confidence that issues would be addressed and fixed. We also had confidence that the product would only get better. Then the merger with “Lightspeed”… From the start we did not like the changes, in fact after giving “Lightspeed” a try we switched back to Merch OS. We were offered a discount if we prepaid for a 5 year plan, and were told that Merch OS would continue to be available if we did not want to switch to “Lightspeed”. It was a no-brainer (we, unfortunately, thought), we liked Merch OS enough to make such a commitment, but then after only a few months it was announced that Merch OS was being discontinued and we had no choice but to switch to “Lightspeed”. We tried to make the best of it, hopeful that enough of the Merch OS developers had been retained to be a positive influence on “Lightspeed”. It seemed from the start that “Lightspeed” was more about style than substance, it was less visually clear, and seemed to push new bells & whistles rather than concentrating on functionality.And the functionality has only gotten worse. Multiple service outages, and severe slowdowns, and hours and days of reduced “reports” as basic as looking at the last transaction. I always refer to the product as “Lightspeed” because it’s a joke to refer to something that moves so slowly and wastes so much of our day as Lightspeed. Now we have irrefutable proof that sales and customer have disappeared from the system, thanks to a random screenshot we happened to take one day. How many other sales, inventory items, credits, customers and who knows what, have just vaporized from our database? I don’t know how we can ever know. Even if they somehow manage to restore the lost data that we are aware of, I doubt that there’s anyway “Lightspeed” will be able, to prove that there has been no other loss. Once aware that such a thing is possible, how can we ever be confident in this glitchy, slow, unreliable system? I am now concerned that they might not have the resources to stay solvent long enough to fix all of their problems, then what will happen to all of the subscribers’ data, (that which has not already vanished)? I await the class action suit that will surely come in the near future. I also hope that some entity will be able to restore Merch OS from the ashes of “Lightspeed” after its demise.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I also agree merchantos was way on top of their game compared to what im going through with lightspeed. All those “outages” have cost me thousands of dollars of lost sales across my chain of stores. And not a single email return from management at Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
while i was very happy with lightspeed’s back office and inventory tracking, it by no means makes up for the mass outages we have experienced on a weekly bases. sometimes service will be out for hours and dont even bother trying to contact tech support to see when or if the problem will be solved unless you anticipate being on the phone for an hour or more.
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Hi Sean,
We are very sorry about the outages that took place in the summer, we know the service lapses were inexcusable and we completely understand your frustration. On a more happy note, we have now been outage-free for two and a half months and everything is running much more smoothly. I do apologize again, feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com if there’s anything else I can do for you.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed is a major disappointment. And not because the program isn’t awesome, but because it crashes, glitches and let’s you down daily. The standard response months on end is “we are sorry for any inconvenience”. Ya, us and our business too. MONTHS.
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Hi Ev,
Thanks for your post. I actually think our software is pretty awesome, what wasn’t as good were our servers, which is why we upgraded them in the summer to allow for more growth. This is what caused the outages, and I am incredibly sorry about that. The good news is we are now two and a half months outage-free and everything is running smoothly on our end! I apologize again, please reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com if there’s anything else I can do.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Terrible from the beginning from recieving the wrong cash drawer and cables to endless problems with freezes, time outs, updates not ready for prime time a clunky and unintuitive 5 page process for processing a sale, all topped off by tech support unavailable when a merchant actually has time to deal with the issues. The salt in the wound they refuse any kind of a refund and continue billing me after I have shut off the service and told them on the phone not to bill anymore. there are thankfully better systems and support out there. I will be taking this company to court to get my money back.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Chris,
I hope you’re doing well. As I told you in our previous emails, as you pay monthly, you can unsubscribe from our services at any time. Simply log into your Lightspeed Retail account, and go to the ‘Settings’ tab on the left, then click the ‘Subscription Settings’ button and deactivate your account.
Also, another thing we discussed was our callback option when you call into support – if you call in and there is a long wait in the queue, there is no need to wait on hold! Just leave your number in the callback option and you will keep your place in the queue without waiting on hold. I know my colleague Jen in Support was trying to assist you with your cash drawer issue; if you would like to reply to her email, she can re-open the case and continue troubleshooting with you.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have found that it takes at least a week to get a call back from light speed, and it does;t solve the problem.
You have nothing like real time customer service.
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I am kicking myself for signing a long term contract. For me this is not the Point of Sale system that I need. I left Quickbooks POS because I really needed a web based system, and I chose this one.The best part are it is web based, you can add new items from distributors catalogs (as long as they are up to date) and the master order for basic inventory items. My issues are many but here is a breakdown:1. You can not return anything to a vendor….they say they are working on an update so this won’t be an issue anymore, however this change has been recommended by users for a very long time and they are just now working on it.2. If you go to sell something and the system does not see anything in stock, it will magically add enough to your inventory to complete the sale. This does wonders for the accounting side! I don’t understand why they will not let you go into negative inventory, but it doesn’t.3. If you sell an item as an each but buy it as a case, the reorder/master order will not work correctly. For example I buy a case of 200 treats and sell them as an each. If I set my reorder for 1 case when I have 0 cases, I will end up with 200 new in stock and up to 199 from the last case. If I set my reorder point to be a 50 each, I have to set my desired level to 51 (ordering 1 case)…the problem with that comes when order day comes and my instock has fallen to 45, then it orders 6 cases. This is for anything you buy as a case and sell as an each.4. Reports…There are a few reports that I need my employees to have access to, but there are many reports I do not want them to have access to. The problem with the software is, it is all or nothing for reports. I can not set it up so they can see the ones that need, without giving them access to ones they should not be seeing.5. Printing price tags is the biggest headache for me. It is way too long to try to explain, just know if you want to print price tags before you finalize an order this is not the program for you!6. If there system is down, you are dead in the water. Since April 17th till today August 5th I have experienced 11 outages that ranged from 5 minutes to an hour. Yes that is when customers walk out the door. I am paying for this service and they are costing me money.7. Random dislikes… No spot for check numbers. Anytime the cash drawer is opened a receipt is printed, and every time a receipt is printed the cash drawer open…even for debit transactions, it will also print 2 copies of every credit card receipt, I have numerous customers that do not want the receipt, so I am just wasting paper. There is no auto fill for customer names or items. There is no warning of duplicate UPC’s or Customer names. There is no customer loyalty program or rewards program in the system, I have to pay an outside company in order to give my customers a rewards program.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’re experiencing an outage as I write this. It’s been down for the past 2.5 hrs. I’ve probably lost at least $1000 in business. This is completely unacceptable. I’ve been experiencing outages at least every 2 weeks for the past 2-3months. Probably the least reliable cloud based POS system I’ve ever used. I’ve also tried to contact my account manager, but he never responds to my emails or phone calls, so horrible customer support to top it off.
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I could not agree more and if you ask customer service to elevate this you never here from them. I am not litigious but this has class action law suit written all over it. After my first 30 days I asked for my money back and what I got was a “good luck with that” and they gave me two more months. Why the heck would I want to spend more time in a horrible relationship.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Lawrence,
My colleague Joseph has been trying to reach out to you to discuss the outage and apologize for what happened. Feel free to send him an email at success@lightspeedpos.com so you two can set up a time for his call.
Thanks and have a great day!
Kind Regards,
Angela,
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ann,
Thanks for taking the time to write another review. You have been very diligent at continually providing feedback, which I have in turn brought to our Product Management team. I’m sorry to hear that you’re still not enjoying your Lightspeed experience; unfortunately it takes time to develop the very specific product features you have requested. I think you may find it difficult to find a POS that fulfills each of your requests as well. I know you have my personal contact information, feel free to continue providing feedback to me directly and I will continue to pass it to Product.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Everything seemed to work great until the last two months where Lightspeed has had several outages which led to thousands of dollars of lost sales. I spoke with a customer service rep and they acknowledged that their servers cannot handle the volume of users that they currently have which causes their system to go down on a regular basis. I’d say that their system goes down at least once every 2 weeks for a good 1-4 hours during which time, you can’t ring up any transactions or the system is running so slow that it is unusable. I’ve also contacted my account manager on several occasion to speak with him regarding these issues and he does not reply to my phone calls or emails. I’m now locked into a year long contract with a POS that causes me to lose thousands of dollars in lost sales. Had I known that this would have been an issue, I would have never committed to a long term contract. I strongly suggest staying away from lightspeed until they are able to fix these system crashes. You can see a timeline of all of their system crashes here: http://status.lightspeedretail.com/
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve been using lightspeed retail for almost a year now. As of the past few weeks, service has been horrible. They experience server issues at least once a week now and at times they last for hours so that I’m unable to ring up any transactions. I’m now stuck in a 1 yr contract with them and a cloud based POS that seems to go down every week during our rush hour which has resulted in hundreds if not thousands of dollars of lost sales at this point. I’ve contacted my account manager several times via email and it usually takes him 1 WEEK to respond. They are experiencing issues right now as I type this. Just to show that I’m not making this up take a look at this system log from lightspeeds own website that shows when their POS is experiencing issues: http://status.lightspeedretail.com/ . At this point, I can’t recommend lightspeed given their unreliable POS and customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am kicking myself for signing a long term contract. For me this is not the Point of Sale system that I need. I left Quickbooks POS because I really needed a web based system, and I chose this one.
The best part are it is web based, you can add new items from distributors catalogs (as long as they are up to date) and the master order for basic inventory items.
My issues are many but here is a breakdown:
1. You can not return anything to a vendor….they say they are working on an update so this won’t be an issue anymore, however this change has been recommended by users for a very long time and they are just now working on it.
2. If you go to sell something and the system does not see anything in stock, it will magically add enough to your inventory to complete the sale. This does wonders for the accounting side! I don’t understand why they will not let you go into negative inventory, but it doesn’t.
3. If you sell an item as an each but buy it as a case, the reorder/master order will not work correctly. For example I buy a case of 200 treats and sell them as an each. If I set my reorder for 1 case when I have 0 cases, I will end up with 200 new in stock and up to 199 from the last case. If I set my reorder point to be a 50 each, I have to set my desired level to 51 (ordering 1 case)…the problem with that comes when order day comes and my instock has fallen to 45, then it orders 6 cases. This is for anything you buy as a case and sell as an each.
4. Reports…There are a few reports that I need my employees to have access to, but there are many reports I do not want them to have access to. The problem with the software is, it is all or nothing for reports. I can not set it up so they can see the ones that need, without giving them access to ones they should not be seeing.
5. Printing price tags is the biggest headache for me. It is way too long to try to explain, just know if you want to print price tags before you finalize an order this is not the program for you!
6. If there system is down, you are dead in the water. Since April 17th till today July 17th I have experienced 6 outages that ranged from 5 minutes to an hour. Yes that is when customers walk out the door. I am paying for this service and they are costing me money.
7. Random dislikes… No spot for check numbers. Anytime the cash drawer is opened a receipt is printed, and every time a receipt is printed the cash drawer open…even for debit transactions, it will also print 2 copies of every credit card receipt, I have numerous customers that do not want the receipt, so I am just wasting paper. There is no auto fill for customer names or items. There is no warning of duplicate UPC’s or Customer names. There is no customer loyalty program or rewards program in the system, I have to pay an outside company in order to give my customers a rewards program.
I am counting down till I can get rid of this program, but due to the contract I will be with them for about 2 1/2 more years,
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Decent product. Poor uptime. Multiple-hour outages multiple times a month. Cripples a retail business when they’re unavailable.You can view their outage history at http://status.lightspeedretail.com/ and between March and July of 2015 it has been downright terrible.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Just a follow up on my previous review:Lightspeed has sent out three emails over the last month promising “infrastructure improvements” and increased uptime. Just today they sent an email telling us about “successful upgrades” that was followed not 20 minutes later by a 2 hour outage.Lots of words, zero actions to back it up. We haven’t gone a week without multiple outages in at least three months.Do not give these people your money; and whatever you do, do NOT sign a multiple month or year commitment!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Michael,
I would like to sincerely apologize for the outages that have taken place since the beginning of July. We know that our software is critical for your business and that these outages are unacceptable. Our engineers have been working around the clock night and weekends to ensure that outages like these will not happen again, and all updates to improve the system have been during off hours around 1-2am.
We want to see your business grow, and rest assured, we are doing everything possible on our end to avoid future problems. We love serving our growing base of customers and want to provide the best product and service possible, however unfortunately this rapid growth comes with its own growing pains. You should have received emails from both our CEO and VP Engineering which explained that an abnormally heavy load on our database caused the network connection for all our servers to go down. To try and prevent this from happening again in the future, we are putting measures in place and looking at solutions to minimize the impact of any unforeseen incidents.
Sorry again for the major inconvenience caused on your business.
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’ve received adequate communication, but we’ve lost confidence in it. It’s been 6 weeks of frequent outages, and we’ve received many e-mails talking about measures taken and improvements done and investigations being launched. Just Friday an e-mal was sent proclaiming “successful infrastructure upgrades” that was followed literally 10 minutes later by another multi-hour outage. An earlier outage’s root cause proclaimed that “user behavior” made matters worse, which sounds like victim blaming to me, the user.This happened during the busiest part of the retail season. From a company that purports to understand the retail business better than their competitors. You couldn’t predict increased load during July and August? Lightspeed has admitted it’s due to “growing pains,” but I still get 3-4 sales e-mails from them a week. This isn’t okay. A POS can’t be down all the time and just keep apologizing and being wrong and acting like words are sufficient. Retailers depend on their POS for their livelihoods, and the customer experience the retailer received is amplified to each of their own customers.The fact you’ve made your employees miserable with lack of planning and foresight leading to long hours doesn’t make me feel any better. Scaling websites isn’t rocket surgery, you guys dropped the ball and lots of people are suffering because of it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Probably the worst pos system I have ever dealt with in my 20 years of customer service. It is nothing but fancy glam over garbage. If you are looking for a POS system that has easy to use pricing matrices, can handle an inventory of 1000 or more items. This is not a pos system for you. If you have a booming etsy store and want to organize your sales. This is the product for you. Lightspeed is designed for one time clients/customers, it is not designed for repeat customers. It is not designed for to handle work orders, dockets, or to help in the organization of incoming orders. This is purely designed for if the customer orders a sandwich, they receive a sandwich. I would not suggest this for any shop that has any complexities to there business(multiple billing options) or inventory (over 1000 item inventory) or pricing (quantitative pricing).Updates for this POS are slow, and often more associated with the look and feel of the POS not the simple ability of calculating figures, reporting, and communicating to your transaction terminals.Support onsite can be done through a reseller, but it is most likely as a user you will know more then they do regarding the POS. The support from Lightspeed has a follow up time of 5-8 months.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Luke,
Thanks for your feedback, sorry you didn’t enjoy your experience on Lightspeed OnSite. I see that you have migrated over to its sister product, Lightspeed Retail, I hope you are enjoying that experience much more!
Best Regards,
Angela,
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
NO STARS
Lightspeed sucks!!!! servers always go down in the middle of a sale says ‘call this number”
so Im supposed to be on hold for an hour while customer waiting for receipt ???
Its total SHIT – cost me more in sales than its worth .
NEED TO START A CLASS ACTION !!!!!!! its cloud that pisses on you and calls it rain.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Class Action is a great idea! They tell you how great it is, take your money then when all these features dont work it becomes we are working on that. And like any reputable company they tell you NO-REFUNDS.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are running LightSpeed OnSite here in Ninove, Belgium. Love the endless possibilities but since a few months now we are in huge trouble with it…
Every move or click we make (when running Lightspeed) it makes everything extremely slow and let’s our iMac crash. We’ve been in contact with Support but without result and we do not get any reply of them anymore…
We’ve been trying changing our Servers (LS Server, localhost,…), another iMac,… Nothing.
It’s really not fun when you have a customer at your desk. They need to wait almost 5 – 10 minutes/transaction!
Example: New customer comes in… You open an Invoice: LightSpeeds makes the iMac freeze. You scan your products… It takes minutes to make them show in your invoice!
You add some printed notes in the invoice or try to save it… Let’s freeze again…
Print a ticket for your customer… Here we go again… Freeze!
This all happens at our iMac where LightSpeed server is installed.
We’re running it on 3 other MacBooks… LightSpeed turns here automatically off.
After some time it’s possible again to make a connection.
Please LightSpeed… Help us! We’re losing customers with this problem.
Best regards,
Koen
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We are a relatively small brick and mortar store. I bought in to the store concept having little knowledge of what I would need from a POS perspective (how many registers, functionality, etc). When I signed up for Lightspeed I purchased a larger package than I needed and got the wrong size equipment as well. I called Lightspeed and complained and didn’t immediately get the response that I was hoping for. However, eventually they changed their tune and took care of me and replaced all the wrong equipments and gave me a refund for the larger package and changed me to a smaller one. In my book it’s never too late to make the right decision if it’s eventually made, and Lightspeed did that in this case. Bravo for exceptional customer service! As far as the POS itself goes there are some functions that still need to be worked on. I am in a business where we receive goods, and send goods back to vendors for credit. When I checked in to how to create a credit PO, there are no viable options. I was told to “Sell the merchandise back to the vendor in a transaction” however I have to pay a franchise fee on that so that’s not going to work for me. Although there’s some bumps along the way it is a powerful POS system and worth the money once you get it working for you.It would be nice if advanced reporting was included as a part of the system and not a separate up charge.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi,We’ve been using Lightspeed for 6 years now in our shop in Belgium. Since 6 months it’s running extremely slow on every client we use. About 80% of the day it takes 2-3 minutes to open a new invoice, scanning a product of printing a price label. It’s like every Mac is crashing and then suddenly it works fine. We’ve been in contact with Lightspeed support a dozen of times and at last they said: we’ve been checking your database on our Macs and it works just fine. Well, it doesn’t in our shop. But for Lightspeed the case is closed. As an Apple reseller we’re working on the latest Macs, and they’re running fine on every other app. We have a major problem and Lightspeed leaves us in the dark.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We’ve been using LightSpeed (the version now called Onsite) for 3 years now. There hasn’t been a time when there wasn’t some kind of bug, some of them pretty significant, and some of them unresolved to this day. We currently have an issue with product costs changing randomly. We no longer have a maintenance plan (didn’t seem to help much anyway) and they refuse to allow us to update to a newer version – where this acknowledged bug has been fixed, without subscribing to ongoing maintenance. I would not recommend LightSpeed. It seems like they spend a lot more money on sales and marketing than they do on product development. Not a good model.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am a brand new user and very concerned about all the negative reviews. We have not gone live yet, still trying to learn everything before we do go live and are in the process of getting all of our thousands of inventory items on a spreadsheet with all the information we need. We have used the help, chat, and called tech support numerous times trying to get certain information. Some have been helpful and some very frustrating. Not sure I made the right decision to invest in Lightspeed at this point.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tina,
My experience with Lightspeed was a relatively positive one, so I wouldn’t worry about it before you try it out live. I think the tendency for reviewers is to come online when they’re unhappy, so it does skew the image a bit. There are probably many more happy customers than their are unhappy ones.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Daniel thank you for an encouraging response.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Tina,
Thanks for your comments, we’re happy to have you onboard as a Lightspeed customer! Daniel is right, many people who post online are the ones who have had unhappy experiences for one reason or another, but I can ensure you that we have thousands of happy customers who love using Lightspeed. I see that since your post, you have been in direct contact with Derrick, our Support Manager, so hopefully your support experience has improved. However since you haven’t yet gone live with your account, I would love to set you up with a follow up orientation session (much like the one you already had), so you can get fully versed in the product and we can get you ready to go live with Lightspeed. Do not hesitate to reach out to our onboarding team so that they can set you up with a session at onboard@lightspeedpos.com.
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thank you Angela. Just an update, I am now live with Lightspeed and trying to stay positive. I have used tech support a lot and there are a couple of things that surprise me. One is my “manager” at my store cannot void a sale unless he has “reports” role. I do not want him to have access to reports. I put a check mark in the admin box for void sales and it does not work. Very frustrated. Tina
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
On hold now for an hour trying to get in touch with support. Oh, it’s OK lightspeed, it’s not like any of us have a family we would like to get home to.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My advice based on our experience is that if it’s not too late, get your money back. Consider trying something like VendHQ. One of our local LightSpeed installers gave up on it and is now working with VendHQ. He’s much happier. Save yourself a lot of headaches if you still can.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Tina, I would be very cautious of LightSpeed. I have to uninstall the software every week and reinstall. I lost sales this weekend due to the software freezing up over and over. I had to shut down and reboot no less than 10 times on Saturday. I’ve asked over and over to speak to a supervisor at LightSpeed to get some resolution and since they are all on the west coast and I’m on the east coast I have to take time while my store is open to meet with them. So I don’t see them as being very consumer centric. Good luck
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Doug,
I have lightspeed Retail, cloud based, what system do you have?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Tina I HAD the same as you. I took a financial loss on my POS and went through shopkeep best decision I could have made.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Buyer’s remorse beyond belief here. The program freezes all the time, I have to uninstall and reinstall every week. This POS system does not integrate with Quick Books Pro, the only way to remotely use it with Quick Books Pro is to set up a PO for every item. That being said it will not integrate sales or inventory. I’ve had the system 60 days and I’ve had to call them no less the 45 times. On day three when I found the software is junk and it does not integrate with Quick Books Pro, I asked for my money back…I was basically told good luck with that. I cannot wait until my contract is up. DO NOT BUY THIS LIGHTSPEED.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Doug,
I’m so sorry to hear you are not enjoying your Lightspeed experience thus far. However I looked into your account and saw that you have been working directly with a couple of our upper support technicians to get everything running smoothly. We also offered you two complimentary months of service for the inconvenience. We do in fact integrate with QuickBooks Pro for accounting purposes, however as we are a separate point-of-sale system, you are correct, the inventory is not integrated into QB. I hope you continue to lean on support until you are a satisfied Lightspeed customer, and do not hesitate to reach out to me directly if there’s anything I can do to help!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
More bad new with the company. They sold me a Zebra Label maker for $300 and I have had nothing but problems with it. So, I called Zebra and the first words out of their mouth was, “our product is not compatible with Mac”. Light Speed knew I had a Mac, so now in order to fix the problems I either have to buy a new printer or a new laptop. After I found this out I called Light Speed of course they take no accountability for it and I asked for my money back since I have a 16 month prepraid agreement, they told me I should have tried a month to month agreement before I bought such a long subscription. Funny thing is, my rep never told me they did Light Speed did month to month subscriptions. So this week I did a free trial of ShopKeep. Good Bye Light Speed, ShopKeep it a 100% better than your POS.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
After trying to get my money back from you for the last 6 months it was clear you were going to keep my money. (note do not buy anything more than a month to month). I sucked it up and went over to ShopKeep. The best decision I could have made for my business. The system works even if the sever fails. A true 24/7 customer support and extremely intuitive and above all else my team and customers are happy that I have a POS system that works. Again the best business decision I could have made.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Recently I call lightspeed to ask for Internet service.. I come from toronto on and this was one of the providers wich I saw in internet.
when I did the reservation they tell me in 10 business days I can receive service .
instalation fee was $100
(Shaw is free instalation.)
Modem $89
Shaw is free
plus 2 months service on front
everything $241.
After 3 weeks no one contact me to do instalation ,modem wich I pick up was broken then 3 months later I still asking for my money .
laurel who is the manager don’t answer now my messages and the tall guy named Ashton G is very rude with big attitude he has a dangerous mouth.
please i advice to you if you want service from them bring a good pair of bodyguards to recover your money .
otherwise you lose your money.
hope this letter can help someone else out there.
Good luck.
by the way I’m using shaw . $32 monthly in excellent customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello,We were a past user and decided to try a new POS and now considering coming back. Our primary goal was to find a reputable Magento integration and hopefully avoid 3rd party connectors. We’re using Magento 1.9.x and had a terrible experience with the ‘Free Sample Code’ provided by LightSpeed and I see they discontinued it. There are other options out there now, or 3rd party integrations for LightSpeed on premise and cloud. This review is primarily shooting down the Magento Connector of the past, it was horrible. Terrible support and LS support had no clue as to what was causing the slow data updates, (1-2 weeks!), duplicate data and inventory sync barely worked. I need to know what’s New today for Magento! I rely on Magento for 80% of my sales, and need a POS that will sync properly with Magento. I really like the LS cloud product and hoping this is the way to go now. The on premise and Magento was a nightmare and not interested in going backwards again.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jason,In order to have a quality integration, you’ll need to make sure you use a company that can support the software. We’re a LightSpeed partner and our software is not Sample Code that requires a developer to use. Our speeds are exceptionally fast, about 10+ products per minute! We also have a Free 14 day trial with a demo Magento cart where you can begin testing within minutes of signing up and you don’t even need a developer to begin using our Kosmos eSync software. Here are some video’s in our You Tube play list for your reference.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPbRu_f6tWE3LHn-esNxWwR5ebfC3UNb_Feel free to contact sales if you’d like a personal demonstration anytime.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jason,
Thank you for taking the time to post a comment. Although I am unable to find your account, I hope you have since come back to us! Unfortunately there is no Magento integration for Lightspeed Retail (our cloud-based solution), however we are always looking to expand our partners and integrations to add additional functionality to our products. There is currently an integration with BigCommerce in the works that will be available soon, and perhaps there could be one for Magento someday! If you have come back to us and made the switch from Lightspeed OnSite to Lightspeed Retail, I hope you have benefitted from one of our onboarding orientation sessions with one of our Product Specialists. Feel free to reach out to our onboarding team at onboard@lightspeedpos.com to schedule a time if you haven’t done so already.
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have been using the light speed POS for a number of years now without any major hassles. We bought the software upfront, had tech support for one year, which was very hard as we are 12 hrs in time difference to Canada and cost me many nights to adopt the system to our needs. However, the support in those days was acceptable, given that Lightspeed had only been going for a short period of time and the focus of the company was to retain customers, rather than a rapid expansion.After experiencing some difficulties with upgrades we decided to keep the system running as long as it remained stable, which it has been, and do not partake in the yearly maintenance plans.I would like to make one point in addition to the comment by the other users mentioned.We built a large database with a lot of built products and associated products. In total around 35 thousand built products. Unfortunately there is no way to export such a database intact and import it with all associated products into a new Lightspeed database. This is what we wanted to do when we wanted to open another store that is independently run by another dealer (not a multi-store environment). The export function in Lightspeed will only export the products, not any associated items or the product relationship, costs etc for built products! Had we’ve been able to do that I would have considered to stay with Lightspeed.When deciding on a new POS consider the export of your valuable data – after all it is you who entered it all into your system! When the software provider locks part of your data away and you cannot access it even for a precise copy to be run on the same software you cannot grow your business with that software provider!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Andreas,
Thank you for being a Lightspeed customer for so long! I would firstly like to share some exciting news that our Lightspeed OnSite Support Team is now available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to help you out! Additionally, expect to hear from one of our senior support technicians in the very near future to assist you with your exporting and importing to your independent store.
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Congratulations for creating one very useless and temperamental POS. Mr. Dasilva I have to say you may be smart but that does not concede to you having any logic. You’ve simply dressed up one program and sold it to several industries under different names. Thank you for being a complete … when it comes to software development. Certain things are not able to be customized on your system. Your support line sucks, hard, as they seem to take the weekends off which, I’m sure you must know (grin), are very busy for all sectors that you sell to. I look for ward to the meteoric (idiotic?) rise of this POS.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Dear Disgruntled,
Thank you for your comments, I’m sorry to hear that you are not enjoying your experience with us. I am the Customer Success Manager here and I would be happy to discuss your experience with you. We most definitely have weekend support to assist our retail customers during their busiest times, as well as three very different products from different backgrounds to suit all our customers’ needs. I would love to chat with you to understand your frustrations to continue to improve the experience for other customers. Feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com so we can schedule a time for a call.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
After reading all these comments there is no way in hell I would go with these guys, I’m also experiencing very aggresive sales pitch, that in itself is a BIG red flag.
the fact that the company will invest more in aggressive marketing instead of development says a lot of about the their true colors. As a small business, customer service has to be the number one priority and these clowns are not in the business of helping anyone.
no but no thanks. I’ll pass. i imagine this will get a follow up comment that starts with “Thank you so much for taking the time to submit your feedback” and then by “we would like to sale you additional crap…
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Cesar,
No, no sales pitch here! I am on the Customer Success team, and can ensure you that customers’ happiness is my top priority. Sorry to hear you didn’t have a great Lightspeed experience, I hope you found a solution that was able to satisfy your needs.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The Amazon integration does not work. Sales will tell you all about the integration. Support will always call it BETA when the tell you not to use it yet.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Alan,If you’re using LightSpeed Retail we can assure you that our integration with Amazon & eBay using Kosmos eSync works. We can also broadcast your inventory to a shopping cart like Magento, X-cart classic and soon Shopify & Bigcommerce. You can create multiple unique listings, create a buffer for inventory of -1, so you don’t oversell, set Amazon price as a % or +/- dollar amount, download all marketplace orders into LightSpeed Retail & even publish unique products that meet Amazon/eBay criteria. There’s just too much functionality to list. Contact us here at Kosmos if you’d like a demonstration of eSync.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
So far we have regretted switching from shopkeep to lightspeed POS. Our service from LS hasn’t been the worst, but their policies have been. With sales tactics like offering expensive solutions for minor fixes that couldn’t been solved other ways, LS tells us AFTER the fact that THEY DO NOT DO REFUNDS. If a company tells us before we order our whole barcode scanner set up for our stores that there are no refunds then we plan accordingly To ensure that this is a leap we would like to take, but when we received the box and figured out we didn’t need the scanner system (and it was unopened in the boxes they were shipped in), they proceeded to tell us that there was nothing they could do. As a small business owner it is essential to have companies that strive to earn your business by being supportive and understanding. LS is not.I strongly urge everyone to do their research on other companies before switching to LS, as we have had a very difficult and frustrating transition with them.
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This is just a few of the blatent design flaws I have found in this POS. Total flaws I have found so far is 47, and that list grows each day I try to set up and configure this system:1) If using a single register with multiple employee, you have to log out and back in with the other employee id when making a sale. You cannot just enter employee pin during sale to assign the sale to the employee. With many clients waiting, this can consume incredible amounts of time. No thought was put to single register, multiple employee enviroments. (Design flaw)2) Receipt templates were not available in French, while the company is based in Montreal. For those who may not know, the primary language in Quebec is French, and by law all invoice and receipts. It took 6 days for them to change the receipts, even then, apparently the tax rates display are not dynamic to the rates saved in the database, they are hard set in the template. Tax rates showed as TPS [123456789], so more waiting while they fix that. There is no place to customize the receipt template yourself. (Design flaw)3) There is no system in place to handle cummlative tax rates, which is the tax system used in Quebec (Amoung other places in the world). Again, keep in mind, this company is based in Montreal. They have only coded for non cummlative tax rates. Putting in the effective rates for each tax is fine, but the receipt must display the rate as actual rate, not effective. So this flaw follows into the receipt flaw as well. (Design Flaw)4) There is no way to wipe (clean) the inventory database yourself, or any other part of the database. Again, waiting for tech support. (Design Flaw)5) In Canada, there is no longer a coin currency of the “Penny”. Sales for cash payment are to be rounded to the nearest 5 cent. Electronic payments are still allowed to be processed with or without rounding. Again, this company seems to know nothing about the country they are based in. The system does not allow for any rounding. (Design Flaw)6) The export for Quickbooks might as well be removed. Tested on multiple occaisons, the exporter they use creates a file that is corrupted at the headers. Hence cannot properly import into Quickbooks. (BUG)And there is much more. This just a fraction of the issues I have found in this POS. To me, any company that sells software without even adhearing to their very own local laws is a company to steer clear of. I can not see how any business can use this POS. Issues from local taxes, to taking 8 to 11 screens of clicking to create a service ticket and close. At best the problems are annoyances, at worst, they can lead you into legal issues.Bad service, to many issues. Would never recommend this POS to anyone. Now, back to rallying all the employees here to petition the boss’s to get rid of this POS. To much time has already been wasted on getting this system to fit our needs, and fix glaring problems. Time to move on. (Side note: over a month now and still not up and running to meet our needs and legal requirements for our location)
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I would give 0 stars if possible. I got lightspeed for my clothing boutique because it advertised integration with quickbooks and with their webstore. I purchased the cloud version as I use an ipad in the store. I had a month to month subscription which worked fine till I decided to get their webstore services as well. I asked a lot of questions and they promised that their webstore could do all those things. Well not really. The cloud webstore cannot show slashed pricing (MSRP and Retail pricing with msrp crossed out). It only shows one price which is the most basic thing for a retail store to have online. On top of that they promised I could customize everything and I hired a web designer who went on to tell me that other than a few minor color and size changes I cannot customize anything. The templates are very few and mostly full of bugs, which they don’t tell you about when purchasing the product. The checkout page doesn’t ask for people’s credit card info. Once the person hits submit, it gives them an error that they haven’t entered the credit card info even though it never asked for it in the first place. That’s a deterrent to conversion. They advertised the webstore services at 50% off if you paid for the POS and webstore all upfront for a year which I’m so annoyed that I fell for it. And they don’t do refunds. So there goes $1400 down the drain and not to mention all the work I did to set up the webstore. They don’t even have functionality to export images and short and long descriptions that you enter to show up online. Their services are crap and the support teams answer to everything is to open an issue on their blog page. Mind you issues that do not get too many votes aren’t looked at. And I see issues from 6 months ago that are still not looked at. If you have time and money to waste, please sign up for their services. Oh and one more thing their quickbooks integration is only with the desktop version so if you have quickbooks online you are screwed like I am. The list of wrong things is so long that I could spend an entire day listing it out. This company falsely advertises features takes your money and doesn’t refund it to you. They clearly do not believe in long term relationships with their customer. Switching to Shopify now on a month to month term. Hopefully they aren’t that big of cheaters.
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Really a good POS. It looks fine.
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Thanks for the kind words, we like it too!!
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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Can’t log in again!! This cloud based software is unacceptable and unreliable. Go for something else if you can!
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We have been what I would call stuck with Lightspeed for the last 4-5 years. We have had so many issues I cannot even count anymore. I think if you are a very small retail operation with one location and less than 500 products, this system can likely work well for you. But DO NOT attempt to add the webstore features or even the multi-store. Nothing works as advertised and the support is awful. They made us pay for the support plan for years. The last year I decided not to renew, after then had been working on an issue and failing to resolve it for over 6 months. I refuse to pay for support when I am not actually receiving it. Even though I do not have a support plan now, I still contact them with issues. It takes pretty much the same time to handle things, 2 weeks till never. I am currently battling a huge issue that is preventing customers from having the ability to check-out on my webpage. It has brought my online business to almost a complete halt. It has been a frustrating few years to say the least….
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Creates more work than it saves!Pros: Looks cool, works on Macs, support is great.Cons: 1. Integration with Quickbooks sucks. It is not one click like they claim. It does not export invoices, it exports journal entries. Also, if you use QB online, you have to get a third party app to import and it takes a lot of manpower to reconcile it all. You’ll end up using tons of work-arounds and probably have to hire someone just to keep the two in sync and take 3 months to train them. You basically have to manage 2 sets of books.2. Mobile POS is basically useless! You can only create and pay invoices on the spot. You can not even open an old invoice! You can’t create repair orders or quotes. Unless you have customers, standing in line, with product and debit card in hand, the ipad POS is non-functional.3. E-commerce, you’ll be hiring a programmer to get anything functional and the least bit of customization. Yet another expense incurred by choosing Lightspeed.These are my biggest complaints. There are lots of smaller ones, but small issues are to be expected. Integration with accounting and opening invoices, quotes and repair orders on the sales floor, seem like pretty basic things you’d prioritize.
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High cost, unstable, unreachable technical support, pretty bad experience here…
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Thank you everybody for posting these honest reviews of the POS, after reading such an exciting and full review off this blog, it is truly disappointing to see so many people having issues with pos to accounting software transition and issues with the Customer Service. There still is a chance I may end up with lightspeed, but very narrow at this point. Does anyone have a recommendation of POS for a mid sized multi-product business with centralized admin control that can handle high volume? Any recommendations are appreciated
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Worst software. They sucker you in with promises. Doesn’t work don’t buy. Tons of errors that take days to get fixed. DONT BUY THIS SOFTWARE. I’M OUT 2K. Feb 2015. They are rude. Pass on lightspeed. You will be sorry if you buy it
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I am reading the good the bad and the ugly to determine what people in my situation have done!
I’m a small business, operating out of 1 brick and mortar (web store not yet up and running as a result of my own laziness) opened a second store.
Lightspeed sales indicated that my 2 stores would be fully streamlined with the purchase of multi store. Found out this wasn’t the case so bought more components. Still hasn’t worked. I’ve inquired about a refund and apparently there is no such beast. In an effort to prove that this system doesn’t work for me, I’ve spent 5 months waiting resolution. Not happy. Not impressed. Not spending more money on an IT specialist.
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Same story with me. And my store they will not refund. Worst company ever
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Hi Christine,
Since your post, I looked into your account and inquired internally as to why your multi-store functionality was not working. It will be our pleasure to have an IT specialist come on site to set this up for you and ensure it is working properly. Your account manager will be in touch with you. Thank you for your continued business and please do not hesitate to reach out to me if anything else should arise.
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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Thanks for the delayed reply Angela. My account managers have contacted me to set up an IT specialist to visit to install VPN equipment at both locations. All well and good but helping me identify that I don’t have the right equipment BEFORE selling me component after component (nearly a year later) is not only poor customer service but poor customer retention. Will keep everyone posted but I trust the wheels in motion will soon resolve my issue. ThxChristine
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Hi Christine,
Thanks for your response. I received confirmation that your multi-store was correctly installed and everything seems to be running well. Please let me know if you have any other concerns!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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I switched our two stores to MerchantOS/LightSpeed Retail during the last 16 months. I’ve got three pretty major issues with the product (other than the way too aggressive sales pitches):
– one of the big reasons I chose MerchantOS was for the Shopify integration, but the app has problems that neither LightSpeed nor Shopify will own or fix…for ex, items on our Shopify web store have dropped photos, duplicated and/or show ‘out of stock’ when our in-store inventory drops temporarily to zero (even though I’ve set, and reset multiples times, inventory tracking to ‘off’ in Shopify)…AND LightSpeed made it clear a year ago they would not support the app any longer as they had their own Web Store app..NOW they are saying that they are supporting the app…can they just agree internally on their web store and plug-in sales pitches?
– Quickbooks exporting from LightSpeed was in any case very very limited in terms of choices you can make to streamline data import to your books…but that may be a moot point now that I’ve upgraded all our Macs to Yosemite because LightSpeed doesn’t work with QB for the Mac 2015 or online, and Yosemite only works with QB for Mac 2015…grrrrr…so we either downgrade one computer to Maverick or earlier and continue to get limited efficiencies in exporting/importing to QB, or stop using the QB integration completely
– there’s a bug in the rather essential Inventory Count part of LightSpeed (kind of important to retailers to have accurate physical counts and not lose data integrity, but LightSpeed though aware of this problem doesn’t want to elevate the fix) that drops the vendor from every item whose quantity is adjusted up or down to other than zero when you use the Inventory Count ‘Reconcile’ function…this means that after going through the process of either spot counting or full store counts, and then reconciling, if you for ex want to see next month what has sold or what is in stock by vendor, none of the items adjusted in Inventory Count (which if you are a typical retailer, will be a major portion of your inventory) will show in those reports.
Having made the switch from RetailPro and POSIM, I’ll never leave the cloud but I am considering switching to another POS in the next year or two if LightSpeed doesn’t address each of the problems above.
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Hi Kathy,
Thanks for the feedback and I’m glad to hear that you enjoy the convenience of a cloud-based system. Here is some insight will hopefully address the concerns you mentioned:
– Shopify Support: We are no longer supporting the Shopify integration. Rather than attempting to rebuild ours, we are working with Accumula, a Lightspeed partner with a track record for creating impressive POS integrations, to create an entirely new integration.
– Quickbooks: You are correct that we do not integrate with QB Online, but QB for Mac 2015 should support our exports just fine. If you are getting an error message, check out this help page for assistance:
http://www.lightspeedpos.com/retail/help/add-ons/quickbooks/
If you are still having issues, please contact our technical support and they should be able to resolve them; they can be reached 24/hours a day at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support, option 1 for Lightspeed Retail. If there is a wait time, I suggest you leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold.
– You’re right, unfortunately there is bug that causes the vendor to drop when reconciling inventory. Thankfully, this is a bug that has been flagged by our development team as being fixed and is ready to roll out in our next update, being released next week!
If you have any further concerns, do not hesitate to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and I will make sure you are directed to the correct person.
Best,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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Lightspeed has horrible customer support. Our system is still not properly set-up three months later. These people are out to take your money and run!
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This is just a snippy thing and you should totally delete this comment… but under web-based or locally installed, you’ll noticed there’s a “need” misspelled. You might wanna up date that. 🙂
Also, though, this is a great article. It’s just incredibly thorough and helpful.
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I’ve been using Lightspeed Pro for the past year here. It’s been in use here for several more than that. In all my many years of using unfinished, experimental software, computer games with hundreds of modifications installed, and even creating games from scratch, I have never encountered a piece of software as unstable as Lightspeed, and that’s running on a Mac. Every operation is incredibly slow, sometimes taking upwards of 30 seconds to open a product file that consists of text only and can’t be more than a couple kilobytes in size. Trying to add photos too quickly will make the entire program crash. We usually get a few crashes per day, and regularly can’t connect for extended periods of time.To be fair, it’s not like I’ve used other POS systems. It’s possible their all worse, and Lightspeed is the best of the bunch, but coming from the web/media industry, I’m used to software that works well and is regularly updated (Adobe, etc). Lightspeed does seem very feature-rich, but if you’re used to the usability and reliability of Photoshop, Excel, or other professional quality software, Lightspeed will have you tearing your hair out.
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If you care about your business you will stay away from Lightspeed POS. The system has a major flaw as it kick you out if you lose connection even though it’s not a cloud based solution.There is no link or self-serve method to retrieve your forgotten password. You will be left with a line of customers that you can’t charge because you will not be able to get into your system.The only solution to this nightmare is waiting for over an hour to talk to support. Don’t sound angry or the “support” will hang up on you. They can’t deal with frustrated customers. The end result is loss of revenue and customers.
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We’ve been using Lightspeed Cloud for a year now and are very happy with the system. I’ve read all of the review here and I’m not for sure if they are talking about the MOS/Cloud/Retail system or the Lightspeed Pro system. It does get confusing having two different products under the Lightspeed name especially since they have changed the names of them again. My review here is strictly on the Merchant OS/Lightspeed Cloud/Lightspeed retail system.A little about us, we are Women’s clothing store with one location and we also have a online store that is hosted by Shopify. When we opened our brick and mortar store we wanted a POS system that would integrate both the online and the brick and mortar store and being an Accountant by trade I also wanted a system that would allow me to keep accurate records without having to spend a great amount of time doing it.Shopify Integration- Works good and does what it is supposed to do. This feature requires a download of the integration APP on the Shopify APP site. I do see however that this APP is no longer available and I called Lightspeed Cloud and I was told that they now maintain it because Shopify will no longer support this APP (assume it is because Shopify now has a POS system). I don’t know if they still offer it to new customers or only grandfathered in their current clients. I would call to verify for yourself.Accounting- I have never been able to get the integration to work. It is supposed to allow you to save it as an IIF file which then is imported into quickbooks. Don’t know if I am doing something wrong but it never gets to the point of saving the file. It does have a CSV export that is really simple and I just create my Journal Entry from that. It takes me about 10 minutes a month to complete the JE and manually enter it in to Quickbooks. I only do this once for month end so I could see this being a problem for shops that do it daily. If I want to see where we are at for the day or up to that day, there is a Totals report that allows you to adjust the dates to see how much you’ve sold, what discounts have been applied, your COGS and what your profit is. It takes about 2 seconds to run the report and adjust the dates. Inventory- Works great for tracking inventory and COGS and there are reports that allows you to see how much inventory you had on a specific date (great for month end balancing), how much was added and why it was added (purchased or refunded). The only knock for us is adding the inventory into the system. Not so bad if you only have one variation of a product but complete Hell if you have several variations of a product. Since we are a clothing store we may have a Dress that comes in Small, Medium and Large along with different colors. They make you go to several screens and back for each variation. This all should be able to be done on one screen.Support- They have always helped us with whatever issue we had. They should have 24 hour service or an on call person and as one person stated above, they should bring back the Forum so we can all learn from other users. I think I have the system down pretty well on what works for us but I bet I could learn a ton from other users since we all use the system in different ways.Summary- I think the system is a great choice for any small business and I even recommended it to a colleague who opened a store and they are now using it. Of course there is room for improvement and I hope that they put their efforts toward making the system more productive and not worry so much about how it looks. Thanks!
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Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for your valuable insight!
A few notes that I hope will be of help to you:
– Shopify: I’m glad you like our integration! Going forward, it will continue to work as it always has, but we are working with Accumula to offer more options for syncing between the two systems.
– Accounting: If you are interested in taking advantage of our Quickbooks integration, please feel free to contact our awesome tech support team at 1-866-932-1801, option 2 for Support, option 1 for Lightspeed Retail. If there is a wait time, I suggest you leave your number in the call back option, which will keep your place in the queue without you having to wait on hold. In cases where the file won’t download, it is typically something very simple that support can fix (ie: the Chrome browser will open .iif files in a new tab, rather than allowing you to save them to your desktop).
– Inventory: It sounds like you are adding inventory item-by-item, which can be very tedious. You should consider using our Purchase Order feature, which will allow you to add many products into inventory from a single page, as well as allowing you multiple options to print labels and match product shipments to future invoices. To see purchase orders in actions, check out the help page here: https://www.lightspeedpos.com/retail/help/inventory/purchase-orders/
– Support: Yes we do have 24/hr a day tech support! Please contact the number I posted above. And great idea on the forum, I will definitely look into it!
Thanks again, Jeremy!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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Do you have any suggestions for making the adding of items easier? We are a clothing store, and I am so concerned/frusturated with the process.
Any help would be much appreciated!
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On the surface the program looks great and I think that would be the case if you had a little gift shop and didn’t need any features or customization. I have had terrible luck with technical support in that if you call 3 times for the same question you will get 3 different answers. The program is not customizable at all and It is pretty much designed to be a one size fits all system. I think that if they put as much effort into development as they do into marketing and sales then it would be a good system.
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I was with the original Merchant OS before the sale and it was fantastic. They were quick to respond and fix any issues. Since the purchase and change to Lightspeed I have sent emails and not received a response. The outsourced the gift cards to another company that only does custom work and made it cost prohibitive to those of us that are very small. I used to feel that I mattered regardless of the size of my company. It doesn’t feel that way anymore.
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I’ve already written a review that never got posted. Do not trust this company. They make it appear that they care about their customers by responding to every review, but support does not resolve issues. Very disappointed. Also, they get plenty of poor feedback on their Facebook (it should tell you something that most reputable companies allow reviews on their business pages–they don’t) but they all get deleted.
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We signed on with Merchant OS about a year before they were purchased by Lightspeed. We loved the ability to use our POS in the cloud. We don’t like that it’s not robust POS software platform. Often it feels like “POS lite”The special order tracking is much better than RMS, the work order management is much better than RMS. We switched to MOS from Microsoft RMS. RMS had very unfriendly support, and charged you a fortune every time you needed help, but they fixed the problem EVERY time. I don’t remember having any issues with actual functionality. Often we couldn’t figure it out, but the functionality was there. Occasionally I had to have custom reports written and were charged for it. But it worked 99.9%. We do events outside the store and didn’t like that we were fixed to one location or hardware solution, so we looked for a cloud solution. Merchant OS seemed integrated with the bike industry fairly well so we went for it.Lightspeed collects vendor information from many vendors in the bicycle industry making entry of inventory items much easier. Lightspeed purchased the software in from MOS about a year after we started with it. It’s my belief that the old ownership spent the entire year working on the merger rather than the development of the software. I don’t recall any noticeable changes or updates in functionality. The voting system gives them some direction on how to proceed, but they never make any progress. They just tell you they are “working on it”. Maybe in 6 months. 2 years later. Nothing….Things like fixing the quickbooks export you would think would be at the top of the list regardless of people voting. This is functionality that can kill a small business, I know, not many companies use QB for accounting… right? The data does not come across clean and you have to go in and manually fix many of the GL entries. If it doesn’t work well you will loose lots of customers. I don’t know if we are the only store that actually balances our books or what. What used to take 2 min in Microsoft RMS now takes 30-50 minutes in Lightspeed Cloud. We can’t put items on sale without using a percentage discount. This means if I’m trying to sell something at a negotiated price $465 but the original price was $549. I have to back calculate the percentage difference, then create a new discount code in the back end, then apply it to the sale. If I just overwrite the new price. It will work, but it will not show the customer how much they saved, or record the discount I gave. It will just change the final price in the inventory for that item. When you have several thousand skews and you want to put things on sale different ways this is VERY frustrating. Some things we want to have on sale by percent off, others a % above cost, others a % below MSRP, others a dollar amount off. Merchant OS told us this was something they were working on when we started with them. Lightspeed has said the same. This has not changed AT ALL and it’s been over 2 years!!!! Once you have put something on sale using the discount code, you can’t tell it’s on sale unless you open that specific item or ad it to the cash register. So, searching for sale items? Nope. Can’t do that. Pretty basic POS/inventory management functionality if you ask me.Lightspeed pro uses slick apple hardware so you can do mobile check out and line busting in your store. We thought these features might become available to Lightspeed Cloud, but no. It’s been a year, and nothing yet.The only meaningful change that has happened since Lightspeed took over from MerchantOS, has been the update to the GUI. As a retailer this is the LEAST important thing to me. I want help running my business, not selling your software!!!! The GUI interface actually got worse when they updated it, not better. There no new functionality added. Now they have created a beta update for a customer facing display. This is another thing that while nice, is not essential…. LIKE BEING ABLE TO PUT THINGS ON SALE CORRECTLY!! It’s really just a feature they can use to sell POS software to new customers.Another instance of buggy programming… if you use a sale rule that sells a product at a % above cost. eg. we sell product to employees at cost +10%. LSC calculates the final price based on the AVERAGE inventory cost. So, we have purchased the same item for 2 years and the price has increase every 6 months. e.g. cost started at $3 and now is at $5 each. So what should be sold to the employee at $5.50 is actually sold to the employee at $4.40. We loose money because LSC isn’t taking into account the actual cost of the item. Prices change all the time. If it’s a cost based “sale rule” it should be calculating off the actual cost, not the average inventory cost. Or at least give us the option to choose. So, now we have to manually check every single item. This doesn’t save time, we might as well use a cash register.It is very clear that Lightspeed is 100% focused on getting new customers, not keep the ones they have. Advertising is everywhere, updates look good on paper when you are searching for a new POS. The things that people are complaining about, you don’t find until you have the system and start using it. They have 24/7 support that is mediocre. The support staff cannot help with anything complicated. They have to forward it to a person who isn’t on staff 24/7. Most of the time we call with an issue for support, we know more about how the system works than the support staff.They also started “adding on”. When we signed on, we were told that any features that were added, would be included in our payments. We have been paying for a long time and got zero new functionality. LSC added advanced reporting, but want more money for that functionality!! That’s not how SAAS should work, certainly not if we signed up one way, you can’t change the rules mid stream. Well I guess you can, but don’t expect everyone to stick around. It’s also interesting reading other reviews here that all of the responses started happening in fall of 2014. This is clearly a marketing driven customer service to rescue LSC from the bad PR it’s getting. Perhaps if they start solving issues for their paying customers they will not have to worry about new customers.I’ll also mention that MOS used to have a forum for users that could post online and have threads discussing various issues. I found it very useful to find work-arounds and learn about the software from other users. They eliminated this, I’m sure because too many people were frustrated with the progress on updates and functionality enhancements.This is not a personal attack on anyone. Frankie and others at Lightspeed have been very helpful at times. They did fix a few of the issues they created updating the GUI. My overall complaint is that right now it seems LSC management’s number 1 priority is new customers, not the ones that have been paying their bills for years now. If they don’t start fixing things quick, we won’t be a customer much longer.
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Hi JT,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a thorough review and touching on all aspects of your experience. I’m glad that you enjoy the Cloud-based abilities of Lightspeed Retail, as well as our integrated vendor catalogues.
I encourage you to continue using our voting system to request product features you would like to see; these results go directly to our Product Management department. We release updates and fixes every two weeks, so although we unfortunately may not have released a particular feature you requested, we are constantly working hard at improving and growing the product.
I also apologize if you have been given the impression that we care more about growing our customer base than caring for our current customers. I am the Customer Success Manager here at Lightspeed and I am always interested to get helpful feedback from customers such as yourself, and always want to make sure you are cared for. If you have further feedback, feel free to reach out to me anytime at reviews@lightspeedpos.com.
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
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Lightspeed ‘Pro’. LAME. I have been using this POS for 3-4 years and would qualify it as my biggest mistake in 20 years of retailing. I fell for the hype and liked the shiny new penny. If I wasn’t $15K deep and stuck with it, I would be gone. Do you like waiting on hold for 30 minutes? Do you like that most of the complicated features Lightspeed ducks out of having to offer assistance with due to ‘security measures’. In 3 years, I never could get istats to work, I paid a lightspeed reseller and he couldn’t get istats to work, now it is gone..I paid for it, NEVER got to use it. Now you get to PAY FOR IT AGAIN with Advanced Reporting. I bit, then got jerked around for two 2 months over advanced reporting not working and had to file dispute with my credit card company (which was ruled in my favor). They (lightspeed) PATENTLY refused a refund I requested within 7 days of purchase (thanks Peter, ace customer service!) Bugs, problems, glitches, poor/arrogant customer support. I hope you have spent time deciphering worldly dialects, you will need it.
No two companies we deal with create their price lists the same way, Lightspeed would have you believe you click import tools, align the fields, click and its done…BULLSHIT. Any new price list we receive (we deal with over 90 suppliers, each update their pricelist twice a year, guarantees your evening(s) will be spent: file modifying, waiting 45 minutes for price lists to update, to then go in behind and find something is off…guess what another 45 minutes of downloading the same price list while you can’t do ANYTHING else but twiddle your thumbs, now multiply that x 90, twice a year.
RUN don’t walk, nothing to see here, but software that tells you your client is up to date, WHEN IT IS NOT! Oh yes, all these great little feedbacks in this forum from Lightspeed staff… I have never, ever been informed of any of these changes, via e-mail, newsletter…Nothing..And I pay them money every month! BUT they can pay an assh*le to sit there and blow up your phone daily about buying another “service agreement”.
If you run a peanut stand and sell a couple different types of peanut, go for it. If you want to succeed in Big Boy retail, don’t pick this mutated runt that isn’t sure what direction it wants to go in, are we cloud, hardware based, mobile???? They don’t know or they won’t tell you they don’t know, I have asked. Lightspeed just wants you to blindly give it money every month while the ‘developers’ change the font and logo and pat themselves on the back. Buyer Beware. And Dave, if you want to contact me about this and a whole list of other complaints, please be prepared to discuss how much time, money, blood, sweat and tears you have put in with Lightspeed, because this article is polishing a turd.
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One star is too many to give Lightspeed. Lightspeed is a system that doesn’t even calculate discounts correctly on sales (really? this is a basic on a POS) and doesn’t let you type to add in products, modify them or add in a customer profile in a sale or take their money, I suggest you look elsewhere. You will be frustrated. Lightspeed always says “next update will be better.” Each update comes with more issues. And the updates are not quick to come either. We are so frustrated, we want to get rid of the whole POS. We have been with Lightspeed almost two years now. They also make you pay for support. The support that they offer isn’t any issues we are having, they are all complaints with their updates. We are basically paying to be their dummies. WARNING: small business owners, look elsewhere!
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Love the POS. Have had nothing but troubles with the e-commerce and find the response from Lightspeed very frustrating. Here I am at the busiest time of the year and can’t get the e-commerce to work correctly. Its’ been a very frustrating 5 months. And there is no one to help.
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We have been using MOS / Lightspeed Cloud POS for over 3 years and it’s working OK– We are in the process of trying to use Lightspeed’s e-commerce solution– it does not feel like the product is ready for prime time + support is not very helpful.
Did you manage to get it to work? did you evaluate other e-commerce / web store solutions that work well with their POS?
Thanks
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Hi Janet,
Sorry to hear you were having problems during your busy season. We took a look at your account and see that your eCommerce cases were solved, but if you continue to experience problems, please reach out to me directly at reviews@lightspeedpos.com so that I can have have an eCommerce support technician reach out to you directly.
Best,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Great solution for small business…as far as it goes.
We’ve been running Lightspeed Retail for about 1-1/2 years, since it was MerchantOS. We were initially looking for a cloud-based POS that manages inventory, but we’ve found the work order management in Lightspeed to be invaluable. We process thousands of work orders per year and have to allocate them to staff based on deadlines and skillsets. Lightspeed does a great job of this, and smoothly integrates with billing when a job is done.
The inventory module also is excellent, handling multi-store transfers with ease, and supporting advanced features like packaged assemblies, matrices, and serialized items. And bar-coding our inventory was a snap.
Having said all of that, the one thing I would warn anyone about with Lightspeed is that developer support is virtually non-existent. Bugs are treated as features to be desired and voted on. There is no urgency whatsoever from the development team in addressing customer concerns.
Here is my example. We do lots of credit sales to other businesses. Lightspeed’s default “Sales Receipt” is confusing to them because the word “Receipt” implies that they’ve already paid, when in fact the sale was just “charged to account”. I wanted to customize the receipt using the template they provide, to say “Invoice” if the sale was “paid” by “store account”. So I made the pertinent changes but then noticed that the tax information on the template, with or without my changes, was missing a tax total at the bottom.
Confirmed with support that this is indeed a problem with their template, and I’ve been waiting for over a year for them to fix it with no end in sight. So I’m stuck with the built-in sales receipt with it’s misleading language, which I can’t fix myself because of lack of developer support.
Bottom line: make sure Lightspeed covers ALL your bases before investing your time and money in the system, because it’s highly unlikely your bugs or feature requests will be addressed in a timely manner. Yes, there is a system for you to “vote” on your favorite changes, but that’s just window dressing to make customers feel empowered. Casting your max votes for a feature guarantees you nothing, however much you may need something done.
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Hi Mark,
Thanks for your kind words about our POS system!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your kind words about our POS system. I took a look at your account, and it seems that since your post, you have et up a customer receipt template and that your issue with receipts may now be resolved. During this time, we have also made huge improvement to the functionality and user-friendly customization options with our receipt templates. If you are still having any issues, do not hesitate to reach out to me directly at reviews@lightspeedpos.com.
Thanks,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
The Accounting reports leave a lot to be desired. We have a retail formal ware store and are looking for a new POS because of the reports. They are total inflexible, You can’t pull up a customer and see the complete transaction( Sales, Deposits,Payments On Account, Balances etc. In one spot.) We have layaways, special orders, deposits, payments Etc. and there is not a report that puts all of this together in one report. 1. The inventory management is great,2. The support is the best.3. Integration with Quick book is difficult and Quick Book support is terrible, once they find you are not using there POS, they put you on hold and you do not hear from them again. Light Speed support tries to help but are limited in there knowledge of problems with down loads on the Quick Book side.Their accounting report are not just bad, they are terrible. If you are trying to review and analize customers, it is a nightmare.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Douglas,
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with feedback regarding reports and our integration with Quickbooks. I have sent you an email to schedule a call so that we can discuss what we are currently working on to improve our reports. I would also like to review the issues you’ve had with our Quickbooks integration to see if we can work together to ameliorate the situation for you.
Talk soon,
Frankie
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Horrible. Lightspeed should be ashamed. Not developed by anyone who understands check out, returns, credits, gift cards, inventory management, cash drawers, time systems, reporting, scheduling based on sales, sales goals, nothing at all. LS is simply a sales corporation with zero tangible retail use. It is difficult for me to not just rant about how awful this system is so I will explain briefly then try to compile a list for easy reading. I have a women’s clothing boutique, since 1998, over 2,000 sku’s, my website does 4x the daily business as my bricks and mortar. 6 months into LS Pro & now I’ve hired a new IT guy to research a workable option, loosing LS as quick as possible and cutting loss (expensive loss at that)…of course they will not refund and stop contract. They say they will call when my rate paid in advance is up. (doubt they call and likely try to charge again).*bought into it with a Mac team at Cherry Creek swearing Nordstom’s uses it. Just went in last week and their sales people told me they dropped it like it was hot. In minutes 6 sales people were gathered around to tell me how much they hated it*promised cvs files would transfer, they do not. had to create new ones with multiple 0’s in front to make it work. (high level customer service took 4 days and came back with no solutions – we had to discover the way to add zeros on our own–extra 0’s don’t fit on hang tags*funny how non of youtube LS sales videos show actual check out process…you have to click what kind of cc! Clicking like an idiot for minutes delaying basic customer check out*no hardware to hold the scanner or cc reader*no finger signature unless you want to pay extreme merchant account fees*messy display, wires everywhere, fancy iMac is only eye candy*iMac mouse not compatible. simply won’t work in LS*had to find specialized printers and replace ones they sent*IT extremely frustrated trying to get our server to work with LS, $1,000’s later and weeks later*we actually still use our old PC and QB to this day, six months later, when frequent problems arise in LS or employees just don’t want to deal with its cumbersome navigation*check out is ridiculous. must sign in multiple times, enter and exit various screens only to do simple check out*returns extremely complicated, multiple screen exits, lengthy-must call tech guy if customer has a credit, just returning one item – nightmare – customer always frustrated*gift cards purchased in store can not be redeemed on line – exclusionary*reports structure not logical and must be saved to PDF and printed to study to make basic business decisions – paper waste big time*reports don’t break down to detailed analysis – just goofy, elementary charts*dashboard elementary and can’t produce detailed reports*time management based on high sales times, not possible*scheduling not possible*which brand of socks, which specific SKU sold better in a certain time frame? not possible so ordering smart defaults to basic observation*no manual, our full time person hired to try to figure out LS had to write a manual for basic problems. she has been let go unfortunately because she couldn’t figure it out with hundreds of hours calling help line (she will come back if we buy a new system)*she was charged long distance on her cell phone in the $100’s because had to call Canada, no international toll-free on cell*customer service reps are strictly sales reps. trained to placate, higher level default constant. higher level rarely calls back after days and days and then to be handled by another sales rep*at training session I had all my 16 employees in attendance. my employees stupified sales reps in minutes with essential questions and then LS defaulted to higher levels and they never answered my employee’s questions. my employees shook heads, laughed and gave me constant looks of disappointment – embarrassing after i promised a high end system*server constantly has to be rebooted in order for LS to function. Open your shop and expect another 20 minutes to get it to open*Very smug and offensive conversation whenever tough questions are askedI am just beside myself wondering how this company has a single customer. My list goes on, but I’m weary trying to warn others of the mess they try to sell to folks. Sorry to say, I feel like an idiot for spending so much time and money on LS.
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We’ve been in the retail business since 2002. We had used the same POS since then, but wasn’t ever truly satisfied with its overall functionality. As we grew, we knew we needed a more sofisticated system. This is when we found Light Speed Cloud.
We have been very pleased with Light Speed Cloud since. From the initial contact with them, to implementation, to ongoing training and tech support, to adding additional locations. Light Speed Cloud hasn’t disappointed.
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Rick, thank you so much for posting those kind words! Hearing valuable customer feedback is what keeps us going!
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
LightSpeed POS is a boon to every retailers is definitely true but today it tailored point of sale software solutions to every restauratuers, coffee shops, bars, hotels more affordable. Its is more secure and privacy protected with PCI/DA Compliancy. They also released a Restaurant POS Software App on APP Store to download for free of cost. https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/lightspeed-restaurant-pos/id474723658?mt=8You can install it from above link; for configuration assistance you can ask help here. http://www.radianttechs.com/en-us/lightspeedpos-integration.html
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We installed Lightspeed Pro as our POS system, based on their claim of seamless exporting into Quickbooks accounting software. A year later and after clocking hours of calls to Support we have never successfully exported data into Quickbooks. Our maintenance plan has now expired so we are left with a dilemma: junk the whole thing and lose our investment (which is not a small amount for a small, new business) or buy another plan and hope that it all works out. Needless to say we are not happy with our choices…
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Craig,
Thanks for writing a review, I’m sorry to hear that you’re having problems exporting into QuickBooks.
Though your maintenance plan has expired, I’m having one of our support staff reach out to you so we can resolve the problem.
Please let us know via email if we solve your problem either with the support member or at reviews@lightspeedpos.com.
Thanks,
Dave
Marketing, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Craig,We can help you in integration of LightSpeed with QuickBooks to export your accounting to Bookkeeping iif format. We do LightSpeed QuickBooks Integration at affordable costs. Our support will be extended based on your requirements. As Pro LightSpeed Consultant, I suggest your mail us to info@pacificwebtechnology.com to get assisted successfully as we stand behind many small business success.
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We are quite pleased with Lightspeed Cloud. As a POS system it suits our needs really well.I find the app itself to be easy to use and intuitive, and any time there have been anything that confuses us (printing labels, etc.), have found support to be a calm voice on the other line; very friendly with none of the attitude I so often come across from support staff.We are now moving our web store over to Lightspeed Web, and I hope it’ll be as good.
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Hi Tamara,
Thank you so much for your kind words! We look forward to continuing to work with you and providing the best customer care possible!!
Kindest Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
There are a lot of POS solutions in the market and a lot of them do some basic things. LightSpeed is not one of those solutions. It goes above and beyond transactional to getting you want you want – data about your customers and business. The key I learned is how its setup in the beginning to get the results you want. Overall I am very happy using this software (going on a few years now) and I’m not sure why people are complaining about maintenance for. Its usually $500 per year for 24 hour service plus upgrades to the software itself. I see that as a huge value and something I am happy to pay. I would 100% recommend this software for small, medium and even larger businesses in retail or almost any other industry.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ben,
Thanks so much for your kind words and taking the time to post! I hope you’re still enjoying your Lightspeed experience!
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Lightspeed states “Print statements individually or use Batch Printing to print statements for all customers with outstanding balances.” The batch is extremely slow, does not include credits or running balances, the print batch actually makes you hit enter for every statement in-order to print it, which is not a batch. Why is such a important common place thing missed?I have spoke to them countlessly. I can’t upgrade because they got rid to the custom reports and therefor my only work around. Now I am suck and they are unwilling to resolve this.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jeff,
I am sorry to hear about the inefficiency you have with batch printing on our OnSite product. If you are willing, I would like to set up a personal call with you to better understand your workflow to see if it can be improved. I’ve sent you an email, please let me know when you’d be available for a chat!
Best,
Frankie Le Nguyen
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
BUYER beware!! If I could give ZERO starts I would. I have been with them for over 2.5 years and would have left a couple of months after if they would have refunded me my $2,000. Now my subscription is up and they want another $599 for 2 users. I could take that $$$ and find an easier system to use that is actually ALOT better. They now offer month to month but the people that have been with them through all their growing pains and invested in them when in reality people shouldn’t have. It is getting better and better however the average small business owner would be wiser to go else where. It will cost you a lot more money using LS than it is worth.
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Hi Laurie,
Thanks for the feedback, and I can understand your frustration. I’d love to set up a call with you to gain a deeper understanding of the issues your experiencing with Lightspeed. Please send me an email at reviews@lightspeeedpos.com and we will set it up.
Thank you,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
LS is good in many aspects : + Easy to learn the basic+ beautiful and mostly clear UI+ quite powerful+/- Reports are good, but sometime hard to get the result you want+ overall, it’s simple to use.But bad in those- PO (purchase order) soooo slow (you know, like waiting 30 seconds after hitting the save button)- Can’t put a item on rebate (they just release a way to do it, it’s good, but far from perfect. Ex. You can put shoes on sale -20% from date X to Y. But when you go to the browser to check if the item is in stock, you will only see the regular price, not the special price. And you don’t even know that this item can be on sale. OK for “weekend where all the store is at 20% off”, less good for clearance where it can stays on the floor for weeks.) – Magento API received a lot of critics (although I don’t use it)- Many different small bugs or weird config (ex. in the report, you have a drop down choice of date to choose from, Report for last year, last month, yesterday… but also, tomorrow, next month… I can’t find one single report that can use a FUTURE date…)- POS screen pretty limited so is hard to balance security versus liberty when user must be on the “main screen” (browser).- Many details they should work on: EX. we can put note on invoices, products, etc.. but there is no way to know that there is a note. So if we open a invoice, we have to click on the ‘note’ tab just to make sure they’re is nothing there. How hard would it be to make “note” in red when there is something?Can’t say I’m happy, can’t say it’s a mistake either to have this software. We use it since ~6 years.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jean,
Thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback. Understanding our customers issues helps us shape the way we prioritize our feature and development efforts, and you’ve provided us with some great feedback. I’d love to set up a call with you to get some further insight on the your experience with Lightspeed and solve the issues you are having. Please send me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and we’ll set it up.
Look forward to speaking with you,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve been using Light speed system for about 1 1/2 years. Let me tell you. Before you begin want to know about light speed system, you have to get extra cash ready for non sense maintenance plan. Im not a total dummies but let me tell you. The tech support just want to know when is your maintenance plan is over so you can renew it, otherwise, most of my question they have to get back to me between 24 to 48 hours. Also, be careful about the new apple update. If you out of maintenance plan, you are stuck. otherwise, you will spend thousands of dollar just to update your maintenance plan. Most of the stuff i have to do myself even though i have light speed maintenance plan. I send all the excel sheet to them to import unto light speed, 80% of them import into light speed is wrong. I have to get into the system and do all by my self. Please stay away from light speed system if you don’t have any extra cash flying around. system cost about 8 time higher than other system and it work 60% less affective than other system. Also, if you sell a cars or other product like less than 10 items at a time is good. If you retail something like over 20 items at a time on the receipt, stay away. Almost every time we check out a customer more than 20 items, system kick you out and you have to pull everything out and start over. I call light speed for the issue, they will give me an answer withing 24 to 48 hours. after 48 hours, they let us know that their support team is looking into it. Still No Answer, But they did let me know that my maintenance plan will expire in 4 months. Hi light speed, just want to let you know that my two other store is installed with non-light speed system.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Henry,
Firstly, I apologize for any support wait times you may have experienced. Typically our wait times are only a few minutes, however the fall months (when you wrote this review) are peak retail months, so call volumes are significantly larger. We have also made significant performance upgrades to Lightspeed OnSite, so if you have not already, I encourage you to upgrade to the latest version to maximize your performance. If you are still experiencing issues, feel free to contact me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com, and I can create a support case which I can escalate internally so that one of our upper level support technicians can spend some time speaking with you.
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Nicole,
Thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback. Over the past couple of months we’ve been hard at work improving usability, navigation, most recently Web Store. We currently have tremendous new features currently in development that we are very excited to announce in the coming months. I’d love to set up a call with you to get some additional feedback on your experience with our software. Let me know a time that works for you by sending me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and we’ll set it up.
Look forward to speaking with you,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightspeed
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We are having horrible issues as well.
My husband documented how opening store 2 would work with Lightspeed Cloud & Shopify. We were told that everything would sync beautifully as long as things were tagged with shopify.
We opened our doors today and discovered that there is no way to have our inventory from store 2 show up in shopify – and that IF they create a way to integrate it would be at least a year.
I don’t even know where to start, but had we been given correct information, we would have had 3 months to figure it out, not the day we opened.
Secondly they gave us bad information about doing inventory on layaway items which created a huge giant mess
And the app keeps glitching and there is no support.
Beyond frustrated.
This is a
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Nicole,
Thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback and I can understand your frustration.
Over the past couple of months we have been hard at work improving the synchronization issues with Shopify. I’d love to set up a call with you to further understand the issues you are experiencing and find a solution for you as soon as possible. Please send me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com, so we can also address any other issues you may be having regarding inventory and support.
Look forward to speaking with you,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightpseed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have used Lightspeed cloud for a year and there customer support is terrible! They promised me they were introducing new features that were needed for my business and never delivered on any of the promises.I would highly recommend that you evaluate the product closely before signing up as it is nearly impossible to export all your information if you do decide to cancel.There are better cloud systems available – learn from my mistake!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Grant,
Thank you for taking the time to submit your response. Your feedback is extremely valuable and it will help us make the experience much more powerful for all of our customers.
While I can empathize with your experience, in the past couple of months we’ve recently more than doubled our Support Squad. Additionally, we’ve increased hours so we’re open 24h during the week as well as extended hours over the weekend:http://www.lightspeedretail.com/blog/2014/09/24-hour-weekday-support-longer-weekend-hours/
I’d love to set up a call with you to get some additional feedback on your experience with our software. Let me know a time that works for you by sending me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and we’ll set it up.
Thanks,
Dave
Marketing, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Dave – Please check out Springboard Retail. We are seeing customers come over from LightSpeed. We have a robust, flexible and proven suite of retail management apps. Web based and hosted on the Cloud.
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We have been using Lightspeed for 2 months and we are already at the point of looking for an alternative.The reports section is PLAGUED with bugs. -If you receive inventory through an inventory count it will be entered without a vendor, only items received through purchase orders will have a vendor attached to them. The response from support was to go into every single item and correct the vendor section. That is over 3000 different items for us!!!-What they call roll up reports only works sporadically and when trying to export data from them, information is missing.-there is no way to obtain a report for sales on specific period of time. So if you are open 24 hrs and only need to know what sold say, between 2 pm and 8 pm so that you can re-stock your shelved, you can’t do it. only full day inventory movements are possible.-THERE IS NO RETURN TO VENDOR OPTION. In the message board is the no. 1 complaint from retailers and has been for years with no real answer from support other than “we re working on it”. When I asked them about this they told me to set up the vendor as a customer and sell them back the items WHAT??!! I am giving this two stars on account that the register end of it is easy to use and intuitive for the cashier but the backend of things is a mess.To be honest the reports section of this system is almost amateurish in feel. Many basic function that would be considered 101 retail are missing. If you have a very very very small operation with no more than say 1000 items or are more of a service provider operation this may be a good fit. Anything larger than that think twice compare and ask experienced retailers what they think
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Bryan,
I’d love to know to which POS system you switched.
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This company is a scam. They have the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I signed up for a yearly contract, which is a hefty fee. They also signed me for their e-commerce. Little did I know that a month after paying the fee I would never be able to reach anyone at this company to actually install it on my computer. They give you the run around-call back, email, or a voicemail. I was charged for an extra month with no service. They also don’t tell you about the fine print for the their e-commerce, which was additional $600. I have tried several times to get a refund for the month of service I did not get as well as a license # so that I can actually install the software, but not one has gotten back to me. My sales rep Robert “Bobby” Fowley is the worst sales rep I have ever dealt, complete shyster, called me non stop to get me to sign up and now I all I get is his voicemail.
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Lightspeed Pro would be good software if:1. They take the time to fix tax calculation errors. It is often off by a few cents several times a day.2. They realize they have US based customers and provide a simple way to import tax rates. In the state of Washington taxes are extra screwy on Lightspeed Pro because tax boundaries are address based and are not a 1 to 1 match with zip codes.3. They take the time to fix the errors in the web store software. Specifically, without a lot of expensive modification, the web store is poorly suited to fractional purchases as in it doesn’t offer this option in the web store. The POS does offer this option. For a fabric store you can get all setup with the POS for the physical store and when you upload to your web store you can only sell yard increments instead of down to 1/8 (or whatever size) like you would find in the physical store. This is a lot easier fix then to chase down the tax calculation errors but I don’t ever expect it to materialize.4. We’re on a grandfathered plan that should be including support but now they want us to pay extra on top of that.5. We have an ongoing error of the server not starting on reboot. Their solution was not to fix the problem. Rather, they have us reinstall the server on every reboot. How crazy is that?6. We must email to request support. I’m sorry but I cannot plan when my POS will be down.7. Missing check for related items error. Instead of determining there are too many related items for memory, there are instances where Lightspeed will happily crash instead.Fixes generally do not happen in any timely manner, whatsoever. They go on for months and then years. I was going to put more stars in the rating, but I realized after typing out this list they need to work harder to earn them.
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Hi Ben,
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. After discussing your issues and suggestions with our product team, we have identified that some are rectifiable within the scope of our product whereas others are outside but we are more than willing to speak with you and share possible workarounds to your roadblocks.
We have been unable to locate your account with us to provide further clarification but I would like to set up a phone conversation with you to better understand the issues as well as gain more insight from your suggestions! Please feel free to email reviews@lightspeedpos.com to let us know when you’re free and we’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Frankie
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using Lightspeed Cloud in our retail store since March of this year. Customer Service: I have found the customer service to be very helpful. I use the chat feature almost exclusively and have always found them to be very responsive and knowledgeable. The one time I reported what was a bug – they reported it and it was fixed. I do wish they had weekend hours. Product: I find the product to be intuitive and very easy to use. I really love it and have been so pleased with my purchase. It has all of the functions I need. I wish it had a better consignment function (for my particular store, that would be helpful). There are things that could be more straightforward, but almost all software has a few of those types of issues. However – my employees don’t like the software. They seem to find and encounter quicks (that I don’t?!) I don’t know why I don’t have the same issues they do. I will say that the usb bar code scanner is problematic and we don’t end up using it. I love the fact that it is cloud based and i don’t have to worry about backups. I did buy both a pc and ipad checkout so that if the internet is out, we can still be up and running.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Teresa,
Thanks so much for your wonderful feedback!! I’m thrilled to announce that our support is now open 24/7 so we have weekend hours for your convenience!
Hope you’re continuing to enjoy you Lightspeed experience!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Bryan,
We have been looking at Lightspeed for 3 years and have never pulled the trigger to move.
We are in the apparel retail biz with 3 stores and multi-sku’s that never repeat.
We have been on Retail Pro for years and it is ancient.
May I ask what you moved to from Lightspeed?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Bryan – which POS did you move to after Lightspeed?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
This is why the comments section can be so valuable. I test the software in a non-real world setting, and though my experience was generally a good one, it’s likely no match for someone who’s using it for real. We’ve been getting a lot of negative feedback here about the company, which can’t be ignored when we update this review next.
Bryan – are you using Cloud or Pro?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am so disappointed with the customer service I have received from LightSpeed regarding the renewal of my SSL Certificate. Because they claim to have not received an email with their lightspeedsupport.zendesk.com my webstore has had the https crossed out and a warning to customers that my site cannot be trusted. I have the copy of my email response which should have triggered the renewal, but didn’t. When you are an independent owner without technical help, I wouldn’t recommend anyone using this software, or trying to run their own store with just the help of their technical support. Very disappointed in LightSpeed. I spent just under $1,000.00 to become this frustrated.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Laurie,
We apologize for the experience you had regarding the renewal of your Web Store’s SSL certificate. After reviewing your support tickets I have seen that the issue is resolved and that an accommodation was made to rectify the issue. Should you have any further concerns or feedback to provide, please feel free to schedule a call with our team by emailing reviews@lightspeedpos.com
Best,
Frankie
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Is it really so bad? 🙁
I’m choosing between the LightSpeed and this company http://poslouisiana.com/
I decided to stop on the LightSpeed but after all these negative comments I’m not sure anymore.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi John,
We would be happy to arrange a one on one demo to help you decide if Lightspeed is the best fit for your business. If you have any questions about this or anything else, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Kindest Regards,
Alicia
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Horrific Support, and ok software. Would not choose lightspeed again if I could go back in time
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Billy,
I’m thrilled to say that our technical support has improved tenfold since your post. We are now open 24/7 and offer a callback feature so that you can keep your place in line without having to wait on hold. Feel free to call us at 1-866-932-1801 and give it a try!
Kind Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We have used LightSpeed for three years at our main location. Upon opening a second store we were happy to see the Multi Store application. Unfortunately, after spending six hours setting up the software and many more hours with the support and sales team to guide us through the install we were unable to use it in the end do to a small technical problem. The replication of product from the main store to the new store was unsuccessful due to duplicate product codes in our main system… 100s… due to the nature of our inventory orders. Many products have the same code but a different finish that needs to be detailed in the description. In order to use Multi Store Pro we would have to edit 100s of product entries. Extremely disappointing after the effort that was put forth. We are investigating another software system to run our two stores.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for taking the time to submit your feedback. After looking at your set up, we’ve spoke with your store manager at length and developed a solution that will take care of the small technically issue you were experiencing. I’ve also spoken with your account manager and he will reach out to you today to ensure you are satisfied with this solution. Please send me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com if you have any other questions.
Best,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
This is one buggy POS solution. The system does not calculate tax correctly and has a very weird, chaotic system to set your taxes up. Lightspeed POS never worked correctly and I cancelled after my first month without a refund.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ara,
Thank you for taking the time to submit your response. While I can understand how incorrect tax calculation can affect accuracy in all elements of your system, this is something that must be set-up quite precisely in order to work correctly.
I’d love to set up a call with you to get some additional feedback on your experience with our software. Let me know a time that works for you by sending me an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com and we’ll set it up.
Look forward to speaking with you,
Katelyn
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
We first purchased LSPRO back in 2010. There’s been a lot of issues, but beyond the problems is the attitude the company has towards their customers when it comes to tech support, not only expensive too maintain but must wait 24 to 48 hours for them to contact you to solve a problem?
We are looking at different options and switch later this year. It so disappointing but we have reach a point where we can’t no longer keep LightSpeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Manuel,
Thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback, we apologize that you have been unhappy with your experiences with support in the past. Over the past several months, we have doubled our support staff, as well as extending our hours to be more accommodating, and typical wait time is now normally only a few minutes. We are also now open 24h during the week, as well as extended weekend hours.
http://www.lightspeedretail.com/blog/2014/09/24-hour-weekday-support-longer-weekend-hours/
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me recently, I hope that you are continuing to enjoy our product.
Best,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Manuel Rivero,
Give a try with us before you choose to leave lightspeed. We found you here to support you better. As a Pro LightSpeed Consulting agency, we could provide immense solutions to problems you faced with LightSpeed POS at affordable costs.
We gladly welcome you to post your problems/issues you are facing with LightSpeed POS to info@pacificwebtechnology.com. We would suggest you consulting free of cost and services at best hourly rates.
Offer us a chance to stand behind your success.
With Regards,
Prakash Rajasekaran
LightSpeed Consultant
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been with LSC since before the change from MOS, and while their support staff is top notch, the rate of development is basically non existent. We saw a huge UI change when lightspeed took over, and it appears that all of their developer resources were funneled toward making the old MOS interface look more “apple-y”. The new interface is OK, but not great. It looks more modern but it’s far less usable. Text fields and buttons have the same flat appearance. Static text appears in boxes that make them look like textareas, but aren’t. Certain clicks bring you to random screens unrelated to where you just came from. The back button that is apparently “fixed” only works part of the time. The UI change also introduced some bugs, and when brought to their attention, the response is a non-confidence-inspiring “we’ll add it to the list but there are other priorities”.
Meanwhile, the system is still plagued with many shortcomings that any serious POS system should be able to handle – shortcomings that have been in the system since the day I signed up. I have compiled a list of my own requests on their feedback site (which, by the way, limits the amount of feedback you can give to six votes, and since they never implement changes, your votes are never released back to you)
You can see my list here, and browse around to see all of the other feedback that has been essentially ignored:
http://feedback.merchantos.com/forums/189811-general-feedback/suggestions/4493928-a-list-for-you-and-we-need-a-way-to-earn-more-fee
I understand that not every wish can be accommodated, however we have seen basically zero feature enhnacements in the past couple of years, other than the new buggy UI.
We can’t return items to vendors, we can’t import inventory or product descriptions from csv (having instead to click into several screens and enter details by hand), we can’t sell fractions of items (say if you want to sell something by weight)… we can’t even specify an “order in multiples of” option for purchase orders – if you have a vendor that only sells an item in quantities of 10, you can’t tell LSC not to order 9 or 11, you have to double check each PO manually. This is basic stuff.
Since lightspeed took over, I get emails almost every day trying to sell me upgrades, or sell me new services. The plans have also all gone up in price and the number of employees allowed per plan has gone down.
I’m starting to wonder when all of this sales pitch garbage is going to translate into some actual programming? There are aspects of their inventory management system that would be better handled by an excel spreadsheet.
Their system definitely increased my productivity over my old system which was a standalone cash register. But development has been stagnant and every month when the payment comes off of my card, I take a few minutes to search for alternative providers.
I have had some great conversations with the people at MOS/LSC but it’s gotten to the point where public reviews (humiliation) may be the only way to see positive change, because it seems like all they care about now is finding new users.
LSC, please stop worrying about putting rounded corners on your CSS buttons and start implementing actual functionality. It’s getting beyond ridiculous.
Thanks,
Bikehounds
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
100% agreed and the worst tech support….”we will get back to you in 24 to 48 hours”???!! Unacceptable for the amount of money we pay!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Bikehounds,
Thank you so much for taking the time to submit your feedback. We know that you recently spoke with one of the members of our product team. If you have any other concerns or suggestions please send us an email at reviews@lightspeedpos.com so we can set up a call with you this week.
Look forward to hearing from you,
Katelyn,
Product Management, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Right here in the comments section is the place to do that. While we have no problem with people giving their true experiences with a company, even if it refutes what we’ve written here, we won’t just let any old feedback through. Check out our User Review and Comments policy to make sure your post conforms to our guidelines:
http://www.merchantmaverick.com/user-review-comment-policy/
We also tend to be skeptical of reviews—positive and negative—that are left anonymously, so we do require at least a valid email address where we can follow up with you to make sure you’re legit.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
BUYER BEWARE. When first dealing with Lightspeed they were great. However their staff is uneducated and they sent me the wrong equipment numerous times. When trying to return they basically told me that they will not help me in anyway. The technical support is terrible and takes over an hr to get in touch with anyone in time of need. i highly recommend REVEL over lightspeed.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for your post, I apologize at the delay on my response, it seems your post was being held in moderation limbo! Revel is definitely a great solution, but we stand by our product; our inventory management is fantastic and we are thrilled to announce a Return to Vendor feature which we know will blow everyone’s socks off! Since your post, we have allocated tons of resources to our technical support team; support is now open 24/7 for your convenience and have a callback feature so you can keep your place in the queue without having to stay on hold. I apologize that you were sent the wrong equipment, but I can assure you that every Lightspeed employee goes through intensive training, and we are constantly being educated and learning new things every day. I hope you are still a Lightspeed customer, but if not, I wish you well at Revel. Feel free to reach out to me at reviews@lightspeedpos.com if you would like to have a conservation about anything we can do to help you.
Best Regards,
Angela
Customer Success, Lightspeed
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
My experience has been similar, over promise, under deliver, bad customer support. Stay away from Lightspeed! feel free to contact me at steve@cellogallery.com if you would like additional specifics in the course of your evaluation. I am a VP of Sales at Oracle and understand software and software sales.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.