Item: Lightspeed Retail
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Lightspeed Retail

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Lightspeed Retail as our point of sale system for our 2,000 sq. ft. retail business, currently carrying over 8,000 active SKUS. As far as basic transactions and inventory management, it does a fantastic job. We also heavily use the customer management features of it, as well as heavy use of the special order features.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great for scanning in items
Master Orders for generating purchase orders across multiple vendors at once
Ability to track multiple vendor costs

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.

Most Important Features

Sales transactions
Purchase Orders / Master Orders
Special Orders

Return on Investment

Easy to set up compared to other Point of Sales systems, if you have your data ready to go, you'll be up relatively fast with Lightspeed Retail.

Alternatives Considered

Revel Systems

When we used Revel Systems Point of Sale systems, we had problems for many months where each device would mysteriously show different pricing for the same product, which is a no-go in a retail environment, this has been several years ago, so unsure if they fixed that, but Lightspeed does not have that issue. Revel did have an off-line mode at the time, which Lightspeed is lacking.

Key Insights

Do you think Lightspeed Retail delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Lightspeed Retail's feature set?

Did Lightspeed Retail live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Lightspeed Retail go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Lightspeed Retail again?

Other Software Used

Shopify, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)

Likelihood to Recommend

For retail environments with small a smaller SKU assortment and fairly straightforward receive item, sell item needs, Lightspeed is a great choice. When you start to get to larger SKU assortments and more complicated inventory reorder requirements, look elsewhere. Also cloud-based with no kind of off-line support, so bear in mind if you are in an environment where internet connection isn't always fully stable. Label printing is also limited, with very little off template printing support, so if you need more information on your labels than the default, ensure you see actual evidence of it before committing to Lightspeed.

Great retail point of sale software for smaller needs, but be careful!