Cin7, headqduartered in Auckland, aims to make complex retail and wholesale simple with all-in-one cloud inventory, POS, EDI and 3PL. Cin7 allows users to manage sales channels, inventory, point of sale and supply chain in one central, cloud-based software. Cin7 offers integrations using third party logistics (3PL) interface and electronic data interchange (EDI), catering for businesses increasing trend to sell globally.
$295
per month
Lightspeed Retail
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Lightspeed Retail is a retail PoS system from Lightspeed headquartered in Quebec. Core retail POS features are expanded on higher service tiers with ecommerce option and payments gateway, an accounting system, and a customer loyalty program.
Cin7 is great because a business can set up quickly without having to invest in hardware/servers, and the business does not need to be concerned about backing up data. Cin7 software is easy and intuitive to use. The pricing was competitive for cloud-based software that can be customized to each business. The software is constantly updated so a business does not have to worry about paying for updates or paying a large lump sum to purchase new updated software. However, Cin7 is able to increase its fees at any time. We experienced a significant price increase after 1 year. With purchased software, a business would not have to worry about unexpected pricing changes. Cin7 offers a useful integration with BigCommerce. Unfortunately, their own B2B website is lacking in features and ultimately not useful to our company. Cin7 does not provide the most useful customer service, as they only offer paid access to phone support. Most of our issue with the software were caused by updates in the software that were not announced, and they could only be fixed via email or tickets the next day.
It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.
Onboarding could be improved. We worked with a programmer who was not as familiar with our business needs. Additionally, the person in charge of our onboarding was initially difficult to schedule time with until we reached out to a manager.
Cin7 occasionally makes updates to the software that causes the software to not work properly. For example, we would experience new errors on a CVS file import for products that had worked previously to the update. Additionally, our custom field implementations would be reverted to original and require set up again.
We experienced semi-frequent outages of the software. The software would not be accessible for up to 1 hour at a time. I believe they took steps to address this and reduce down time.
With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.
The Cin7 support team has never let us down, even if they weren't able to completely solve our problem. They are willing to have conference calls, video chats, whatever works to help fix your issue.
I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
As a wholesale focused business, we found Vend to be tailored to retail businesses. TradeGecko was well suited for our wholesale business, however, lacked the full range of capabilities that Cin7 offered (B2B website, POS). Fishbowl had many features that we would not need. OMS Office Master System offered the wholesale capabilities we needed, however, the software could use an update. Cin7 was a perfect balance in terms of features and pricing for our company.
Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
