Lightspeed Retail Reviews

Lightspeed has literally saved us 20-30 hours per week. It connects and communicates well with all of our other systems; including accounting and loyalty platforms.
Their customer and technical support have been extraordinary and have exceeded our expectations. In fact, I think their technical support is the best not just in the point of sale industry but any industry. I find myself wishing other vendors I work with had the same level of support and professionalism.
Lightspeed also listens to their customers; this is evident by requests made in their support area. They actually respond to every request.
As a small business owner, we worry about many things. Lightspeed is not one of them!

We had two separate Retail POS systems in our organization. One was so antiquated it had to be replaced and the second one was experiencing issues everyday and the support was lousy.

We purchased LightSpeed. I had the Retail Operators go through the setup videos and make decisions on how they wanted to setup the system based on the videos. Then, when the Operators completed their training, I had them configure LightSpeed themselves based on what they learned and the decisions they made. We then entered the inventory and the rest is history. I would recommend LightSpeed to anyone looking for a retail POS no matter what size.

2 basic issues that they have not fixed have ruined my experience with what otherwise could have been a good system. Since I started using LS in 2019, when you receive part of a customers special order the system will put it into sellable inventory not reserved for the customer causing many inventory problems. The 2nd issue started in dec 23, I am no longer able to refund a customers purchase and put it back into inventory. A basic function of any POS system, its now march and still not fixed.

Overall, I think Lightspeed Retail is an excellent product and very simple for most any retail operation. I highly recommend it to colleagues for their POS/Inventory/eCom solutions.

We have had a great experience with Lightspeed. It gives us the reports that we need to run the business efficiently. The waitstaff can easily take orders and payments without any problems.

I personally like lightspeed for inventory management. It is one of the most complete software out there and it is still growing. I would like to see them growing in other areas as well.

It was amazing. Loved ii!

I have a small health food store in Sullivan, MO. We have been online with Lightspeed POS for nearly a year now. The partnership with Pointy is much appreciated. Even without paying for additional online presence I believe the Pointy helps direct traffic to our business for sure! Also the Lightspeed system easily allows you to track profit margins and sales. This by far has been my favorite asset to the system. Of course it does rely on setting up your inventory accurate, which is a process but a process that is undoubtedly an INVESTMENT! I tracked sales over a couple of months and noticed a dip in profit margins and traced that back to companies raising wholesale but not increasing the MSRP. This hurts brick and mortar retailers. I was able to easily pull up these products from certain vendors in an isolated manner and go through where our retail prices were set and be sure we were setting it at a proper profit margin to keep the lights on! A month after doing this I noticed profits margins went from 35-37% to 38-40%. We offer 20% off our set prices just to keep up with online businesses, so we have to make sure the set retail will allow us a proper profit margin after the advertised discount. LOVE this feature! Customer service has been prompt to help anytime we have asked. They are adding and improving things all the time!

We migrated from Lightspeed Onsite to Lightspeed retail nearly a year ago now, and the move has been fantastic. I did a LOT of research before the move to ensure we could take our Onsite Data over. Actually turned out there was some Workorder data that wouldn't migrate, but the upside to move to retail outweighed this by a long way. (As as work around, we simply left LightSpeed Onsite running side by side to Retail, and refer back only occasionally to Onsite. Isn't as big a deal as I thought it would be)

Lightspeed retail is quick and powerful. Inventory management is completely accurate, and keeping track of special orders for customers is a breeze. We used to keep manual systems in place to keep track, but these have been retired.

Customer management is excellent, keeping track of who owes what and what customer has how much on deposit for special orders. Lightspeed retail also integrates easily into our Tyro POS system, making credit card payments easy and accurate, no fear of adding or worse, leaving a zero off of the bill.

Work orders can be colour coded to show where jobs are up to, and we keep all customer notes in the system. With LS retail being cloud based, I can even send a tech out onsite with and iPad and a Mobile Payment device and invoice, take payment and close a job before the tech leave customer site. On top of this, I have integrated a third party application called Service Reign to manage emails to customers post job to glean customer feedback.

We are a retail and repair shop that has 1 location. We were looking at a way of integrating our online inventory to our retail, so our inventory can be managed. There are very few things we would change about this platform. Its nice that as the company develops, they listen to customers needs and make relevant changes based on that. It's almost a 1 stop shop for being able to run a successful business.

I worked with other POS systems in the past and find Lightspeed much more user friendly than the others. You can build your menu in literally a few hours and the flexibility is amazing! I have not come across a single scenario in the build that isn't already addressed within the system. And the video tutorials are well done, explaining processes step by step,
The technical support team are quick to respond and follow through issues to resolution. I recommended Lightspeed to two colleagues already and will continue to share my positive experiences with others.

The experience has been fantastic. The support staff and sales team have been great. The ease of use is something very special compared to their competition. It has allowed our business to prosper in these uncertain times.

I would not recommend anyone, in any situation, use these features or services provided by Lightspeed. They are money hungry and nothing else.

Once we signed up and realized we were unhappy, our sales rep would not return our calls or emails-(Ben).We had numerous hardware issues and tech support could not figure our how to help us. For example, our bar code scanners were not functioning correctly and we had to search for days on the web to figure out how to fix ourselves.

Frustrating. Doosync - the migration company, by the way was awesome!

While there are pros and cons, the pros far outweigh the cons. It's easy to use, intuitive, and best of all, THEY LISTEN. It doesn't take 10,000 customers complaining to get Lightspeed to make a change. Their support is excellent.

We have used Vend for many years who were recently acquired by Lightspeed. I have no words for how bad Lightspeed and their company are, and I urge anyone considering using their platform to walk away and find an alternative.
They have recently demanded that all users convert to their integrated card payment system or face charges on their monthly accounts of up to £500. We were originally paying £89.99 per month for Vend, which was then increased with Lightspeed to £129.99 per month. To then be advised that if we don't use their card processing servicing, we could face charges of up to £500 per month is astounding and unethical. We were advised that one reason for this increase was due to the charges they incur for our business using other payment providers. This is utter rubbish; I myself use a static card terminal in a bricks-and-mortar shop. Lightspeed doesn't incur any processing charges, fees or inconveniences from my card terminal. After many, many emails back and forth with our account manager and following a call, he finally understood that, as a business, we were tied into a contract with our card supplier and could not move to their integrated service as they demanded.
I was advised that these additional fees would not be charged as we aren't in a position to move our card processing across to their systems. However, I have been told that my fees for the platform this month, based on our transactions, are now £250! When trying to speak with someone from customer services (surprise, surprise only possible online). I am told that this is because I am not using their integrated card processing service!!!
I wouldn't mind quite so much if the system had shown vast improvements or if they had introduced new fantastic facilities online. We have actually found the system to be slower than before and with many glitches with stock deduction and control. There hasn't been any improvement.
I don't know how Lightspeed is able to get away with behaviour that flagrantly ignores anti-competition laws in the UK.
I'm in the process of finding a company that provides an online platform and has an honest and trustworthy approach to business. Lightspeed is definitely NOT this company.

We had purchased the system for 3 of our establishments, and only installed it in 1 of them as a trial. Because of how bad it was, we decided to cancel our service. Even though we had not installed the other 2 locations and had used the product for 3 month in the one installed, they are forcing us to abide by our 3 year contract and pay the full amounts.

Even with having to cover that cost, which is completely unreasonable because 2 of the services were not installed, it is still much better and efficient for us to switch to another more functional service such as Cluster or Maitre-D.

I would not recommend this to anyone who has a restaurant.

-We switched to Lightspeed from ShopKeep because we needed to manage the inventory of our 5 locations in one place. That part works okay, once you figure out all the idiosyncrasies of the restock and reorder system. We had to hire a person just to manage the work-arounds we put in place to make Lightspeed a functional system for my business (because there are so many tedious extra steps).
-Feeling stuck is the worst feeling as a small business owner. Lightspeed make me feel stuck. I hit a new wall in the system regularly, and when I ask for what I need, the answer is ALWAYS "no, we can't do that." Some examples:

-The system does very little to tie sales and inventory together, it does next to nothing. You can export a sales report by item name, which is great. It tells you how many you sold, your sales numbers, and how many you have left. But the vendor information nor the department information for the sold items is not on the export. That makes the report useless in terms of knowing what vendors your business is coming from. Their answer is you can then export vendor sales separately. That is not helpful, because that export does not include item info or department info, nor does it tell you your on-hand inventory. There is not a single way in Lightspeed to view your sales and on-hand inventory in one place, and because their exported reports are so sparing of relevant information, I can't even create my own. This is a major flaw. With ShopKeep, at least I could get my data out of the system to manipulate it how I needed. With Lightspeed, I am SOL.

-I don't even call customer service anymore because 100% of the time all they do is validate the problem and then offer no solution. Their consistent response is to tell me to make a suggestion to their developers.

-I have been in business 10 years. We have 5 locations, and a website. I have 40 employees. I think Lightspeed would work for a single location or 2 location business. But any more than the system creates more work than it takes away. Looking back, I wish I would have stayed with Shopkeep.

I run a tiny seasonal business for which this system was intended. If someone is unhappy with my service, refunding their money is not always my first approach, but if I know that I've fallen short on service, I absolutely look for a fair solution. I was fine with keeping the hardware originally sent to me and even paying for the time lapse on the software, but to say that all software sales are final when they are the one that set the contract lengths to being with is just shady and downright distasteful. It's not like they put money into developing software just for my company. In fact, any time I tried to get support to help tweak things, their support team seemed more annoyed than willing to help. Stay away from these guys.

We are a small retail store with three locations that does mostly local sales and some online sales. We manufacture some of our own products as well as re-sell other products. We also do a lot of large custom orders. We explained in detail to our sales person what kind of business we were and what our needs were for the system, including the type of work orders/invoices we needed to be able to format for our employees and customers.

We were promised that all the forms and reports were totally customizable and it would be no problem. This is not the case at all! The work order forms and invoices can barely be customized and the only way you can customize it is if you know script or how to write in code. We've called customer support and they have offered no help on how we can customize it to fit our needs or even offer some outside resources that we would be glad to pay for. All we've gotten is "sorry, we can't help. if you want to request for this feature in the future, they may or may not add it."

We were fully expecting and promised to be able to format our work orders and reports from the start, but now we can't every run our business out of this system. Total waste of money!