Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you are doing all the different streams of business music stores or similar small businesses would have Rain Point of Sale is a great solution. If your store is more similar to a gift shop or cafe it may be too much for your needs.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Integration. One customer list. One product item list. One inventory count. POS and website store that function in real time with each other. Responsiveness. New features and tweaks to the user interface are actually constantly being developed based on our feedback and requests. Multiple location support. We have two stores and many of the other platforms we shopped didn't have good solutions for that. Rain lets us have a combined product database with different reorder preferences. Also, a new update to the system made transferring serial numbered products even easier. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Reorder amount preset options could more sophisticated. I'd like to see the option to automatically "round up" the preset reorder qty up to 10 or 12 or 6, etc. This was possible previously but they added other options that changed the automated reorder suggestion to the difference between your current count the ideal count you have set for each product. This is good for some items, but not for others. Guitar strings come in a box of 12, but sheet music can be any number. And then some items we purchase in a box and then sell individually. Rain does allow for that in the purchase order automated reorder quantity. Mostly, I change each reorder quantity as I am copying and pasting the product codes into the vendor's website. Not huge deal breaker. And I believe they will eventually add more options like I want to see. You do need the internet to do business. So in case of a localized broadband outage you can use your mobile device as a hot spot. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are very pleased with the service
Read full review Usability Very easy to use and figure out without calling customer support which is also very responsive and helpful.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review We migrated from a less integrated situation of running
ShopKeep for a POS system and the
AIMsi as a billing solution. This created a lot of extra steps for a large percentage of tasks.
AIMsi is just to hard to work with and it is very difficult to use it efficiently across multiple locations since tri-tech wants to license how many computers you can use it on and so on.
ShopKeep works well but we wanted ti move on to something a tiny bit more sophisticated for tracking repairs and replacing some of the billing functions of
AIMsi , and we wanted to have a web store finally.
ShopKeep doesn't go past being an easy to train on POS system with inventory tracking.
Read full review Return on Investment Certainly has saved money on cash-outs/ accounting due to QuickBooks integration. Faster processing through tills means happier customers and more sales per hour. Expensive product at $5K a year has taken away some profitability for this small business. It's way, way over priced. Read full review We did not have any type of web-store before starting up with Rain Point of Sale so adding that online presence has helped us bring first-time customers into the store We have had one or two bad deals happen because of the site - so watch out for scammers using temporary office space with a fake business as the ship to address. Not Rain's fault, just part of doing business online. Read full review ScreenShots Rain Retail Software Screenshots