My experience using lightspeed

What are the best aspects of this product?

1. They have a fast support response team. They won't have an answer for your problem but they will pick up your call. (Greg, Luka, Matt, couple of the great support staff they have at light speed)

2. Lightspeed is a good price point for their software. You can have 7 iPads with lightspeed but only pay for 5 systems. This is great if you need to accept payment in different parts of your store. Downside is you can only be using lightspeed on 5 devices at a time but thats fine, you usually never do.

3. They are constantly updating their software, better or worse. I know they are listening and trying to update the software asap.

4. Its iPad based, if you need to switch to another IPAD based POS its easy.

5. The interface on the iPad for ringing customers up is intuitive. If you set up your categories correctly and color coordinate and place your items strategically, light speed is very easy to use and it doesn’t require much training for younger staff.

Would be great only for small stores, Any store that has tons of customer rushes or restaurants should stay away.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

Where can I start...

I am only writing this review after a WHOLE YEAR of using horrible Lightspeed experience.
I write this review to warn you, I did my research but clearly not enough. I measured all the pros and cons of every POS and at the end of the day Lightspeed was not the right choice. DO NOT use this system. They might offer you these features and price points but at the end of the day, your business will suffer greatly because of them… I have a tech background and I still had trouble setting up their system. I am not a TOAST POS representative but check them out instead. Don’t do it. I’m warning you. It's a mistake that will cost you your entire business.

If you still don’t believe me, I will tell you more..

I know every single support staff by voice from Greg, Luka, Matt, Lorimay, Nino, Lliana….ect
These people are all great, they really tried to help me with the problems but at the end of the day, great support is only great when the software can perform. I don't think any of the people that work on the lightspeed software have ever used their system in a real fast pace restaurant or quick service before. I'm sure they've "tested" their software in a restaurant while holding the restaurant's hand every step of the way, but when it comes down to it, the problems that I've faced using their system just shows you that they never fully tested their system.

1. Transactions don't go through sometimes. The payment processing device and lightspeed lose information sometimes and lightspeed tells my employees that the payment didn't go through. This ends up my employees assuming the payment didn't go through and double charging my customers.

2. The online ordering system that they provide for "integration" through their 3rd party software is a joke. They never evaluated the actual software and have it as a feature to bait you to buy their software. From Zuppler to Mobi2go, I've spoken with all of their providers and it's definitely not a solution for a busy restaurant.

3. Don't be surprised if some of your orders don't print to the kitchen and your customer have to wait over an hour wondering where their food is. The system randomly skips orders. (They did fix it, only after many months of my suffrage)

4. You can't print a past receipt or even email it to someone if the email hasn't already been attached to the receipt. (work around is to take a screenshot of the receipt and attach it to the email of the customer or print it out)

5. Their “new” gift cards suck. They don’t even print the remaining amount on the receipt. Also, you have to buy this $350 bluetooth scanner called socket. It's not for restaurants it will break. You have to also buy a charging station for this scanner. This scanner must be connected EVERY DAY. The connection dies and you must reconnect it using the iPad settings>bluetooth. If you don’t want to buy this scanner, you can type in the number for the gift card manually; however, if one of your employees make a mistake the gift card transaction will go through but there won’t be any money on that card. Example: card digit is 123456 but employees types in 12345 the transaction will go through and everything seems to find until the customer comes back and sees that there's no balance on their card.

6. To complete a cash transaction it is :
Step 1. Ring up the customer 
Step 2. Press Pay 
Step 3. Press Cash 
Step 4. Enter the Amount of cash given by the customer 
Step 5. Lightspeed will open the cash drawer and tell our employee how much cash needs to be given back to the customer 
Step 6. Our employee gives the cash difference to the customer 
Step 7. Our employee closes the cash drawer 
Step 8. Our employee Taps on Cash 1 more time 
Step 9. The cash drawer opens again 
Step 10. The employee closes the cash drawer 

This is the current workflow of completing cash exchanges. However, in this step, there's an unnecessary step of Step 8.
They have to close the cash drawer twice for every transaction.

7. Searching for a receipt on the back-end is VERY difficult. You can't search by the amount and nor can you search by the credit card #. Good luck finding a transaction since you can’t find it easily. (they have shown me a new update that fixes this but I’ve yet to see it work)

8.Creating modifiers for products is SUPER difficult. Lets say you have 10 sandwiches with and each sandwich has a default bread and default cheese. Lets say these sandwiches all have different default bread and cheese. (Pretty common thing) To make modifiers for these sandwiches you need to make 10 similar modifiers with each modifier’s default to be set to the one you want for the bread and 10 for the cheese. SQUARE does a great job in tackling this problem but SQUARES features are so limited to I can’t use them.

9.They have a “Self-Ordering” system. However, this system will show your ENTIRE menu to the customer. Their work around is to put a fake discount button so certain items don’t show… This is their solution for me. Pretty sad that they didn’t think restaurants wouldn’t want their entire menu on a self-ordering system. Also, you have to pay for another monthly device for their payment processor.

10. In the past modifiers wouldn’t print. Lets say two customers get a grilled cheese. One asked for tomatoes and One didn’t. On lightspeed’s receipts it will print without showing the modifier randomly..meaning my employees get confused and they give the wrong sandwich to the wrong customer. Doesn’t seem like a big deal until that customer has a HUGE allergic reaction and goes to the hospital and your business is now in a lawsuit. (Lightspeed has fixed this issue but I dealt with this for many months with no solution. They wouldn’t believe me in the beginning and told me they are working on it but never got any response until months later)

11.During one of our busiest days, they decided to update their lite server. Of course something went wrong and all our devices stopped working. It turned out one of their engineers messed up and pushed out code. In turn they were “sorry” but I lost a lot of business that day. They didn’t offer anything but an apology and that its fixed. I lost thousands of dollars that day of sales and employees working and taking down orders with a pen and paper.

12.If you’re in the US, you will have to use CAYAN. That's their payment processor. Honestly, they suck too. Lightspeed and Cayan do not sync up and they don’t have any communication in place for when problems happen. They just blame each other and say that's on each other's end. Cayan once told me I had to go through every single receipt every day to count the tips I’ve gotten for the day to add the tip total. I have 800 customers daily.. Talk about a great solution..

13.They have a new “kitchen display” it sucks as well. Its really not thought through all the way. Once you finish an order the receipt disappear. You can’t find it easily unless you go back into light speed and have the receipt ID #. The idea of the kitchen display was to get rid of receipts, however, with their current system you can’t since if you need to find that receipt again you need to go through a big hassle to find the receipt.

If you’ve gotten this far to read this..you either work at lightspeed or you’re really debating whether you should still use lightspeed.
At the end of the day, it's your choice. There are so many more options out there, why risk your business’s future on software that isn’t there yet.

If you work at lightspeed, I’m sorry I had to post this terrible review on you guys but I am really frustrated. Sending me a $50 giftcard isn’t really a great apology. I’d much rather have a conference call with someone higher up who can make real changes happen. I’m still here using lightspeed but at the end of the day..I will probably have to make a change soon. I really want to believe in your software because of the 100s of hours I spent on it but I can’t when basic functionalities don’t work. Heres my case #401865. Matt, your technical specialist, is working with me on a lot of these problems and is doing a great job but I definitely need to talk to someone higher up about these issues.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

A fully capable of the basics software
Online ordering system
Swipe card on the ipad instead of having another device i need to pay for

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

a newer pos system

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes