Lightspeed Retail

Pros

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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Pros

Lightspeed has the basics complete. Matrixes, easy sku set up and fairly intuitive POS.

Cons

The customer service is terrible. The team is constantly selling new add ons that don't work and then no one every responds. Overall, I have felt the system does not do what they say it does. For example, we were sold on a shopify integration, which is not true. We were also sold that their reporting is great. It is not only terrible, but you have to pay a lot more for any reports that give you actual information (like inventory valuations).

Pros

User-friendly and makes it easy to manage inventory, process sales, and check stock quickly. Helps speed up transactions and reduce errors. The system’s ability to handle multiple payment methods is also a big plus.

Cons

The system can sometimes be slow, especially during busy times, which can frustrate customers. There’s also a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using some of the more advanced features.

Pros

The fact it could do the basics well. i.e. take payment of an order.

Cons

The integration issues, added costs of including so many additional applications and the delayed payment over the weekend, where lightspeed invoices did not match bank account inputs due to when the eftpos fee is attributed. This adds a lot of manual effort when reconciling.

Pros

Inventory, POS, Reports, and discount features are all easy to configure and use.

Cons

When completing an End of Year inventory count, you must submit the entire count before seeing the total cost of products counted.