Lightspeed Retail Erfahrungen

After two other point of sale systems; and after two years using Lightspeed, it is by far the best in all categories.
We had two previous POS systems that fell short in comparison to Lightspeed. Part of our success with Lightspeed is that after two previous point of sale systems; we knew what we really needed and the right questions to ask during the sales process. We submitted specific questions in writing. All of our questions we answered in detail in less than 24-Hours. The sales team knows their products and knew my industry. In fact, most of our distributors catalogs are already pre-loaded into their system.
The transition from our other popular POS was relatively easy, especially in comparison to our previous transition. The Lightspeed team was always there to help and even anticipated needs before I knew them. The inventory system and purchase order system work well.

The only limitation we have with Lightspeed in related to the fact that we sell a lot of items by weight. This does not create a significant problem for us; but having bulk items accounted for in inventory would be a nice to have. We would love an integrated scale capability. The Lightspeed team was more than willing to help us set up our system to sell bulk items; it works better than another other POS we looked at.

I have installed numerous POS systems in my 30+ years of experience. LightSpeed is by far the most comprehensive system, yet easiest system to implement and use.

There support mechanism is second to none. If you look your question up in help, there will be documentation to answer your question, and chances are there is a video that walks you step by step through the solution.

If you feel like you want to get live help, there chat mechanism is one of the best, better yet, the support people on the chat are the most patient and knowledgeable support people in the business.

Simply the best.

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I really appreciate the seamless integration between the POS and the eCommerce. I also really like that this is all web-based, so that a computer can be used for the interface rather than a cash register that will only serve one function. When there is a problem, Lightspeed is usually ahead of me in giving notice that there is one and gives the approximate timing for the fix. Also, if you have both components and the payment processor is down (like at Christmas), you can easily set up the purchase online and your customer can process their goods and walk out of the shop a happy customer.

It feels like the frameworks for the eCommerce should be a little easier to use, but I've had much less robust platforms. Also, I'm still trying to find a better solution for shipping for the kind of shop that I have, but don't actually blame Lightspeed. It would be great if there were a more integrated and less expensive phone app add-on for shopping.

The features is most everything you need. The support is the problem.

The support is horrible. They think they know and understand issues better then the customers. They don’t listen and will treat you like you don’t even matter.

The only two positive things I can say is Lightspeed payments work seamlessly and Dylan, our trainer was great.

Cons:1. The register pops open on every transaction-including charges2. Try and find a sales transaction from a couple of months ago. Lightspeed only shows a limited amount for each day.3. There are limited amount of reports available.4. Only uses Dymo printers which are cheap, always jam and the product tags are extremely expensive. If you tag your mechandise, get ready to spend alot!5. Jumped into training mode without a warning and no way to prevent soneone from going into training mode.6. Lacks a variety of controls that you can give a user. 7. Products can only be priced by markup not margins.8.Good luck tracking returns.9. Payment reports are confusing.10. When you call support, be prepared to know more than they do!

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

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

Accuracy is very important and when I run a report or look at inventory it is correct.

The sales person told me I would have reports and I did for about 4 months, I was then locked out of the reports and could not pay my suppliers. I had to pay more money per month based on their employees mistake. I went with Lightspeed based on the monthly price. It is not completely what I needed for my store but the price was within my budget. Now I have to pay hundreds more per year so I can run one report to pay my suppliers. Be warned they do not stand behind their employees promises.

I liked the sales pitch. He promised a ton of stuff that I wanted to hear. Unfortunately none of that stuff ever panned out. Just like a politician.

Here is a list of my complaints about Lightspeed Omnichannel (eCom + Retail PoS)

- No E-mail Automation what-so-ever, you'll pay $10/month just for Abandoned Cart Recovery E-mails

- Are you a franchise with individually owned locations? No support for that.

- You can only add one merchant gateway on your entire account, but you can have up to 100 locations. But if each locations needs a separate bank account, NOPE.

- Loyalty and Customer Data does not sync between multiple lightspeed accounts to help remedy the above.

- Online documentation is wrong about 80% of the time.

- Importing products, customer data, etc is chaotic at best.

- The eCommerce features are not in sync with the PoS side.

- Loyalty program doesn't just have a "For every 100 points get $1 off" option, you have to set very static discounts for loyalty

- Customer service takes weeks to respond if you have any issue outside of what Support can handle

- Tech Support will respond with "Lightspeed doesn't currently offer a feature like that, you can custom develop your own though using our API."

- Every action you need done, will require another department to speak to, which they'll get back to you weeks later.

Being able to track profit margins and sales. Knowing what products to keep around and which ones to remove from inventory.

There are 2 different sales screens and each has their pros and cons…. but this is probably the most confusing thing in the system.

- ecom and retail link seamlessly
-open and close cashes easy for staff
-each staff has own login to track sales progress and customers
- can limit staffs access to certain tabs that are irrelevant
-painlessly easy to submit orders, and create new product
-can easily provide quotes for potential customers
-easy to do inventory checks from your cell phone, great for purchasing at trade shows or counting stock in warehouse.

Cons: -Limited integrated payments
-Limited ways to get content linked to other selling platforms
-Blog
-doesn't do penny rounding for cash sales (canada doesn't use pennies)
- creating a work order- we cannot add or remove tabs that show on work orders
-system crashes during work hours, (bugs in system) approx every 3 months, which means we have to use manual receipts and cash only.

...Lightspeed Onsite is a great program, Lightspeed Retail is not a good program and still needs alot of work. In my opinion it is being sold without the kinks and issues being worked out of it. Even lightspeeds own technical support reps will admit the many issues wrong with the software and specifics that are different to lightspeed onsite.

-You are not able to take deposits on an invoice (without using a difficult round about method)

-My inventory pricing can change weekly, prices are not able to be adjusted, but only discounted, and discounts have to be created, its not something you can just type in.

-I sell Fish & Corals, thus I currently type them in as miscellaneous coral or miscellaneous fish on Lightspeed Onsite and then change this description to Yellow Tang, Clownfish, etc to reflect the name of the fish and then i just type in the price. Super easy on Lightspeed Onsite, on Retail impossible to do this. When you type in/scan Misc Fish, then change it to Yellow Tang (For example), as soon as you type in/scan misc fish again, it changes the first one to a quantity of 2, preventing you from typing in clownfish. How am i supposed to scan each fish? Even if I made barcodes for each and every fish, my pricing on livestock can fluctuate based on availability week to week, supplier country, and size, so I can just re-inventory 3000 fish every week. Not to mention we have over 3500 corals in store, and when we sell them they almost all have different prices, again I cant type these prices in.

-DISCOUNTING IS A DISASTER!, you have to first create a discount and then choose it from a drop down box. So a customer comes in and negotiates with myself of one of our employees, instead of paying $60 for a coral, we sell it to them at $53, its not possible

-Does not allow Negative Inventory

List goes on

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

- Very complicated to customize any forms or reports for your business or not able to customize at all
- Lack of customer support
- Sales person overpromised on what system was capable of regarding our small business needs that were explained beforehand

I really like that I am able to customize our website and integrate third party apps & APIs easily. And the customer service, the customer service is top notch! Through migration and implementation, the Lightspeed team was right there. At a moment's notice, I can chat with the team or give them a call. Although I may be a one-woman tech team, I have help! It's such a blessing to have a support team for our business. It has been easy to integrate all of our business critical resources and provide a more unified experience for our employees. Employees can access customer data, order data, shipping data, marketing data and product data in one platform. I've been able to customize our store template to our specific business needs and design requirements. It's been a developer's dream.

My main dislike is that I don't have FTP access to my files on LS servers. This would be extremely helpful to optimize our images as needed.

I also would like to upload customer data myself. At this time, to upload customer data in bulk, I have to send the data to Lightspeed for import.

More options for discounts and coupons would be helpful - BOGO, Buy 2 Get One, or FREE Shipping codes based on domestic addresses only (not international).

It's very convenient that it's cloud based, allowing me to access my POS from anywhere. The payment processing is very quick. For commission based employees, it's nice to be able to assign employee credit to different line items on a single sale. The inventory matrix tool is very convenient when it comes to editing wholesale and retail pricing. That's about where the positives end for me in regards to this POS system.

*Individual customers can only have a single sale/layaway/special order at a time. I hope you don't deal with commercial accounts that send their orders to you using separate POs. There's no way to separate different orders from a customer. It all gets put on the same sale/layaway/special order.
*If I send a purchase order to a vendor for 10 items, but that vendor is only able to ship me 5 of those items immediately, and will ship the other 5 once available, I have to delete the 5 backordered items off of that PO in order for the "finished" PO to match the invoice sent by the vendor for the 5 items that did ship immediately. Once the PO is "finished" in retail, I'm unable to edit it or add the backordered items back to it. *So I need to make a completely new PO with those backordered items and reference the original PO in the notes so I can trace it when those backordered items do finally ship.
*There's no easy way to view all customer layaways/special orders and the information/notes within each one.
*The "Company Name" field of a customer account doesn't show up on the customer lists.
*Trying to print labels is a really goofy process.
*I'm unable to change the "ship to" address on purchase orders if I need a product shipped to different locations, example: drop shipping directly to customer.
*There's no way to print a customer packing slip for deliveries or shipments.
*Discounts are applied to total quantity cost of line items, instead of each item individually.