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.
N/A
Mindbody
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Mindbody is business management software for gyms and spas, as well as fitness and yoga studios built around appointment scheduling and online bookings and calendaring, from the company of the same name in San Luis Obispo, California. Notably, the platform also contains marketing automation to maintain club member engagement, and enrollment.
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.
Mindbody excels in areas that rely on the "bread and butter" of its design: scheduling, member management, and payment processing. Overall as a fitness center management solution, Mindbody is by far the best product we have used and they have evolved their capabilities in good alignment with our needs as well.
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.
Mindbody does a great job of sending out reminder emails to clients so they do not miss a class.
Mindbody does a great job at giving instructors a fast and easy way to check in clients and to see who is all signed up for their classes for the week.
Mindbody has a great payroll feature. All you have to do is set the dates and it generates a nicely laid out PDF of all the classes you taught during that time period and what you have made from them.
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.
There is so much functionality and not enough accountability. I wish there were more tracking of all transactions done on the clients or operations end to be able to review history and learn from mistakes.
The Mindbody branded app connection needs more attention.
Please add a covid vaccination checker to the application (not just to use in the web browser). It has taken way too long to get this feature.
Settings are often buried, user interface rules vary depending on whether it's a newer feature or an older one. From daily usage, people learn how it works and get used to it, but it's not something someone could just pick up without any training or hand-holding.
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.
Mindbody support takes forever to get back to you via email in my experience. The process is not as simple as it was back when they had the chat feature. I really wish they would bring that back! Most items are normally some weird glitch that they can fix in minutes but you have to wait days now.
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
Mindbody is really the only system of its kind that is widely used by fitness and yoga studios. Its app is the industry standard for looking up and signing up for classes, so most students rely on it exclusively. If there were another viable alternative it would have to promise more ease of use and intuitive backend.
I've had agents help me set something up that ended up costing time and money because it was done wrong. [In my experience], less senior agents need to stop guessing or going with "I think so" and talk to a senior agent to make sure what they are telling the client is correct.
