Lightspeed POS

"Great integrated system"

Comentarios: Lightspeed has been great. We have been using it for over a year and it has met my expectations. Whenever I request help, which isn't that often anymore they are quick to respond.

Puntos a favor: The best feature of LIghtspeed is the analytics package. As a senior manager you can spend a lot of time calculating your performance manually in excel. But the Analytics package takes care of all of that. It's easy to see the performance of your inventory, employees and marketing at any time. There are also a lot of apps that work with Lightspeed that make it the most functional POS system I've used. The fact that the ecommerce is integrated as well makes it a great fully integrated system. You could pay a lot more to piece together all the of the systems you need. Or you could spend a huge amount of money creating a custom system.

Contras: There are some small idiosyncrasies like not adjusting sync times for your local time zone. So, yesterday is never accurate you have to wait for the next days sync to get have accurate information. I would also like to be able to have our time management app sync employee time to Lightspeed so we don't have to enter it manually. I've given up on tracking employee hourly performance for this reason. Or if they offered a better time clock management natively that would help. I'd also like them to include the previous year comparisons in their dashboard. And, I'd like to look at seasonal performance rather than just month to month and week to week.

"!!SMALL BUSINESS WARNING!! NOT FAIR"

Comentarios: !!WARNING!!! THIS COMPANY IS NOT FAIR!
They bundled in the loyalty program in our automatic renewal. We were looking into the addition to see if it fits our business. Another $800 was tacked on to our renewal for the Loyalty program that I did not authorize. They are refusing to refund the Loyalty program fee say that we are in a contract and they have a phone recording committing to the contract (they won't actual share the recording though). We have no need for this extra program at the moment, have not used it and do not plan to use it at this time as our business volume has a ceiling and the margins do not support it at this time. We understand the value in the loyalty program by cannot presently justify it. I have not worked for or worked with a company that does not work fairly with their customers. I do not recommend LightSpeed and am stuck with them for another 11 months and plan to find a better POS partner.

Puntos a favor: The software is comprehensive. Many add-ons are available at high costs.

Contras: It can get complicated and takes some effort to train new staff.
Support is good for the software although I have found that are led down the wrong path and wast time. Some of the representatives are not knowledgeable enough.

"Most complete and easy POS"

Comentarios: Very easy to use

Puntos a favor: It is easy to use as you can search for the individual items and put items in categories. It also enable us to put in modifier on each item with additional price too

Contras: Very expensive compared to other POS. Only if the report format can be modified to be a little bit more simpler

"Lightspeed doesn't put their customers first"

Puntos a favor: Nice user interface. Good features for a shop that does service work. Cloud-based software makes it easy and convenient.

Contras: Our bike shop has been using Lightspeed for 5 years now, first with their Mac based software, and then with their cloud based software (Lightspeed Retail). There are many great things about the software, but on the whole I would not recommend a small business owner to hitch their cart to this company. There are significant bugs, inventory control is a disaster, but worst of all, fundamentally Lightspeed does not care about their customers. What Lightspeed cares about is their roadmap which in most cases doesn't deal with fundemental issues that their customers have been bringing up for years - if you have any doubt on this, look at their "ideas" page where top voted on features and requests have sat dormant for years. My frustration has boiled over due to an issue with the way their inventory system works, and the way their customer service team has responded to my pleading that they at least give me an ETA on a fix. Here's the backstory: Lightspeed does a very peculiar thing which is that it will auto-add inventory if a product is sold but does not exist in inventory. Not only this, but Lightspeed will auto-check-in inventory off of POs if a product is sold. Now this in and of itself is a disaster as far as accountability is concerned: how is one supposed to track POs when product mysteriously gets checked in! But the worst part is that there is a bug in their system which will auto-check-in product off of POs if product is put into a work order. Doesn't matter if said product is sold or not, it will check-in the product regardless, causing a nightmare scenario where we are trying to figure out what POs have truly been received, and which POs Lightspeed has decided to receive automatically. I brought this issue up for the first time around 6 months ago, and never got any solid response on a fix. I contacted support in April again. After a lot of back and forth about whether this was a real problem (like I love spending time contacting support) the support tech Derrick agreed that this was an issue. I asked for an ETA. No ETA was available. I followed up a month later in May. Still no ETA, but Derrick assured me this was a priority, but also assured my significant problem that is causing myself and my staff time and frustration and vigilance and additional systems and workflows to remedy is "an extreme edge case scenario so I'm curious about how it could be causing you significant workflow issues." So now we are in July. This supposedly "high priority" "extreme edge case" bug is still not fixed. No ETA. No communication. Since we started experiencing this issue Lightspeed has stuck an e-commerce link in the middle of the navigation bar and continued to work on integrating their e-commerece into every other cranny of the software, even if you don't use their e-commerce. They've added a new feature called Analytics which costs additional monthly fees. Their API is still slow and unsupported. Their App marketplace is effectively a Potemkin village of fake apps with no real syncing with the silo that is Lightspeed. The promises of a cloud based POS are so great, but Lightspeed does not deliver. If you are looking to invest time and energy in a retail POS platform, I would strongly encourage you to look elsewhere. Lightspeed looks very slick on the surface, and it is quite good in many ways, but the underlying company culture does not put their customers first.

"Best decision I made for my business!"

Comentarios: Overall, I would recommend Lightspeed POS to any other retailer (especially clothing and shoes) in a heartbeat! If you have been manually counting inventory and have no customer sales data, this is a must. It was easy to set up and continued to be easy to use for me and my employees. The cloud based feature is perfect because I never have to worry about backing up important data and I can "see" my business from any device with internet access. It's brilliant.

Puntos a favor: Lightspeed POS provided instant inventory, sales, customer and employee data that was missing from my retail business. It was relatively easy to set up and I had lots of support! The amount of information we now have about our retail business is staggering and it allowed us to connect multiple locations which made inventory transfer a breeze!

Contras: I had hoped for an integrated Loyalty program from the start (this has now been launched). We were manually keeping track of points for our customers which became tedious and inaccurate quickly. The new Loyalty is a good start but it feels a bit clumsy at times and not as customizable as I would like. Sometimes inventory issues pop up when items are returned. For example, special orders from one location that are added to a purchase order for our main location, automatically show in stock at the needed location when simply checked in at main location. This can cause confusion as they are not physically at the needed location just yet. They have to be physically transferred but should not be added to inventory or received once they arrive (they were already there!). This took us a while to figure out and caused many inventory numbers to get out of whack.